When I was younger I could not imagine that someone might actually choose to be ignorant. Because of my good fortune in having been raised in a household that valued education, choosing not to know something was unthinkable to me. And yet, large swathes of Western society have done so. And even more shockingly, done so with determination! In Charles Dickens’ heartwarming tale of moral … Continue reading Choosing Ignorance
Most of us are familiar with this derogatory term and I am using it so that I do not have to mention the current chief executive of the USA. The media universe is filled with pundits who spend barrels of ink and zillions of electrons explaining why this policy or that policy has been enacted in the US today — even though yesterday the opposite … Continue reading Mansplaining
Military leaders have frequently been accused of constantly preparing to fight the last war. I wonder if NATO is not guilty of that sentiment today. Since its inception, the political-military alliance has had as its primary mission, the deterrence of aggression against Europe by the Soviet Union, led by Russia and since 1991, Russia alone. In mid-May of this year in a post titled Military … Continue reading Fighting the Last War
For those readers who don’t speak French, my title refers to what came to be known in the French military as The Young School and referred to a strategic concept developed during the 19th century (1870-1905) by the French Navy. As I described in my book Strategia, it got its name from the fact that it embraced leading edge technology to replace the use of large … Continue reading La Jeune École : The Siren Song of Advanced Technology
Sir Niall Ferguson (not related to the person after which the law is named) is a Scots professor who is currently a Senior Fellow at Stanford University and has studied and been a professor at many of the world’s most prestigious universities including, Harvard, the London School of Economics, New York University, Oxford and Hamburg University. He is an economic/international historian and currently lives in … Continue reading Ferguson’s Law
Recently The British PM The Rt Hon Sir Keir Starmer sated: “My first duty as Prime Minister is to keep the British people safe.” Several people have lauded the PM’s comment and wondered aloud why we never hear something like that from a Canadian PM. All I can say is, “thank goodness we never hear a Canadian PM say something like that.” Safety is NOT … Continue reading Unintended Consequences
Everyone thinks they know what strategy is. But the definition of strategy seems to be malleable. A bit like pushing on a badly under inflated balloon. If you press on one portion of the balloon, another portion rises. The limited amount of trapped air simply shifts. In the many various definitions of strategy, there is inevitably some amount of commonality of terms, but no two … Continue reading Strategic Patience
Most readers will recognized Carl von Clausewitz’s most often cited statement that “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” This declaration, often misinterpreted — even by famous military thinkers like chiefs of the German General Staff — is pregnant with meaning. Today, I would like to share an incident that I have thought of regularly in the nearly four decades since it occurred. … Continue reading Military Thinking and Politics
My irregular rants are supposed to somehow be linked to war and warfare, and this one will get there … eventually. The philosopher Heraclitus lived in Greece in the 6th Century BC and is credited with the statement that character is fate. I was raised with that precept, and that is the theme of this short essay. In the West, we seem to have lost … Continue reading Heraclitus
Near the end of WW I, British Maj Gen JFC Fuller, a tank officer and military theorist, as part of his “Plan 1919” introduced a concept, which he called “Brain Warfare.” The idea was to disable an enemy by attacking command-and-communications infrastructure rather than by focusing on troop attrition. This was a form of psychological paralysis because mechanized troops and tanks would cut into the enemy … Continue reading Brain Warfare
