United States Department of Defense’s Post

Ein Aggressor wird keine unterlegenen Truppen in die definierte Auseinandersetzung schicken, sondern die Parameter ändern, um gewinnen zu können. Niemand muss Sun Tzu aktualisieren, nur weil nun #Drohnen und #Desinfo zum Repertoire gehören. Starker Beitrag aus WestPoint: "European countries sit at a historical turning point, one that potentially affects their long-term national survival. The existential-level shock that many suggest is a necessary condition for groundbreaking changes has been delivered to them by the Russian attack on Ukraine. All of them responded with more and faster investment in their national defense. Unfortunately, too many have been pursuing misguided responses to this shock and continue investing in poorly suited and even meaningless capabilities based on the continued illusions about the conduct of conventional war. Observations from the war in Ukraine point toward a need for a complete paradigm shift. A theory of war that works for one country and in one time may prove to be wholly inapplicable to other countries in a different time. When that happens, leaders must be prepared to modify or even abandon that theory of war. European countries should completely redesign their national defense approaches based on the realities of the twenty-first-century battlefield. Failing to do so may force them to pay the ultimate price in the event of Russian aggression."

This is a really thought-provoking article with some astute and unconventional insights by Sandor Fabian (Ph. D.). The necessity of a whole-of-society approach to national defense tailored to each state's specific cultural, historical, and geographical particulars as well as the need to better understand Russian military doctrine led me to think of Mikhail Frunze, the "Soviet Clausewitz," whose concept of war invovled the total mobilization of society and who has been highly influential in the development of Russian military strategy. Part of this whole-of-society approach involves domestic information operations to legitimate military operations. On the one hand, the Soviet-Afghan War with all its secrecy and then the outburst of public criticism following glasnost' is a perfect example of what happens when the state excessively represses any narrative construction. On the other hand, the high media permissiveness during the First Russo-Chechen War in which international and domestic media denounced Moscow's invasion of Chechnya as a war against national liberation undermined Moscow's narrative. Only in the Second Russo-Chechen War did Moscow strike the right balance, both carefully controlling media access and also constructing an effective narrative of "counterterrorism" rather than "counter national liberation" to legitimate its operations in the eyes of the Russian and international publics (GWOT helped with the latter, too). Western analysts would be wise to study this development of Russia's info ops to better understand why Russia's "hybrid" warfare (new generation or new-type war, as the Russians call it), with its heavy emphasis on info ops, came to the fore in Ukraine. Jennifer Counter

Our latest publication "US Builds “The NATO of the Indo-Pacific” With the QUAD" by Mirko Giordani is available on Rosa Roubini Associates' website. In this paper, we discuss: 1. How the war in Ukraine has "revitalised" #NATO in Europe; 2. NATO, #QUAD and the #US strategic trade-offs between Atlantic and Pacific oceans; 3. The current state of the QUAD; 4. How the is US is investing in other regional groupings for #security, such as #AUKUS. Read it here: https://lnkd.in/dHv6f6Z

End of 2019 French President Macron described NATO as 'brain dead'. And now? As of today, Sweden has become a member of NATO, after Finland took this step last year. Sweden has valued its neutrality for over 200 years and has never been involved in a military conflict. Now it is joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization - a defense alliance.  Today will certainly not be a 'turning point' in the history books. But today clearly shows that the security tectonic plates on our globe are shifting. Things are starting to move. The direction is difficult to describe and even more difficult to influence. But the plates are realigning! New alliances are forming, new lines of confrontation seem unavoidable. On the one hand, social systems with fundamental liberal values - but who is the other side and what does it look like? 

Thought, on-point analysis that doesn’t just apply to the Europeans. Many have misread the war in Ukraine as a state-on-state, force-on-force conventional war. But despite that framing, it is as irregular a conflict as it is conventional. The under-appreciated lesson is this how to integrate and synchronize irregular and conventional warfare - strategically, operationally, and tactically. For those conducting such analyses, it would be wise to give this insight a more serious look, because it’s not a one-off.

Not Your Grandfather's NATO: Restoring the Alliance The Heritage Foundation 17 Jul 2024 Throughout the Cold War, NATO proved itself to be among the most successful alliances in history, deterring the Soviet Union and preventing an attack on its member states. Most NATO members then fielded larger and more capable militaries than they do now – militaries that were built up through decades of sustained investment by individual member states. After the end of the Cold War, too many NATO member states thought that it was “the end of history,” and defense spending took a 30-year hiatus, only really resuming in earnest following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Now, some member states have stood up in a big way, hitting their spending goals and contributing substantially to the collective defense of the alliance. Other member states continue to lag behind, preferring to rely on American defense guarantees than provide for their own defense. This has to stop. America’s European allies must take primary responsibility for security on the European continent through sustained increases in defense spending. Learn more as experts Elbridge Colby, Wilson Beaver, Nile Gardiner, and Robert Greenway discuss how we can reverse decades of decline and restore NATO.

Previewing this week's NATO Summit 2024, Kurt Volker, AUK Supervisory Board member, and former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, highlighted some important messages. In particular, he emphasized the next steps of the NATO mission to help Ukraine and clear steps to deter russia. “Until now, NATO has done nothing for Ukraine. Everything has been done by individual allies like the United States or Great Britain or Poland. That's about to change because we're going to take this assistance coordination process. That the U.S. has led outside of NATO, we're gonna put a NATO flag over that. Thus, there should be a new NATO mission to help Ukraine.” “I would be much happier if Ukraine were in NATO right now. They are the strongest, most capable, most interoperable military, most battle hardened military in Europe today. The war we face in Europe right now is the biggest in Europe since World War Two, and the whole reason that's happening is because they were not in NATO.” Commenting the last horrifying strikes in Kyiv, Kurt Voker emphasized, “Those missile strikes on the Children's Hospital in Kyiv are a terrible, tragic event. But what viewers need to understand is russia does this every day. This is not an accident. Until russia sees that kind of overwhelming force, they are going to keep fighting and keep killing and we are going to face the prospects of a much larger war. So they have to be stopped. If if we don't stop him now, we're gonna see worse later. And it's gonna cost us more.” What Ukraine should expect from the NATO Summit 2024 in Washington, D.C., we invite you to listen to an interview with Kurt Volker for C-SPAN at the link: https://lnkd.in/ggPiBwUz

As NATO prepares to celebrate its 75th anniversary in Washington, Russia's ability to threaten alliance members is real and pressing. Can Kasapoğlu, author of Hudson's weekly Ukraine Military Situation Report, explains how NATO needs to change to counter it. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/enfG8NW6