GWOT Reconsidered

This article was published in Culture and Conflict Review (Summer 2009), v.3 no.2"Around the same time, Pentagon staff received a memo from DoD's [Department of Defense] Office of Security Review explaining the White House 'prefers to avoid using the term 'Long War' or 'Global War on Terror' (GWOT). Please use 'Overseas Contingency Operation.'' This new, less catchy phrase has been publicly used by several top officials -- from the DoD to the OMB [Office of Management and Budget]. But frustration with the GWOT's terminology is not new. Even President Bush came to regret the one-size-fits-all simplicity of the term he made famous, admitting in 2004, 'We actually misnamed the war on terror, it ought to be the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world.' Obama's rhetorical re-assessment of the GWOT into a series of nameless, and seemingly disconnected, Overseas Contingency Operations (or OCOs) has as much to do with the GWOT's controversial verbiage as it does with his desire to reshape the conflict along a more logical, and sustainable, axis.

Bernard Brodie and the bomb: at the birth of the bipolar world

Bernard Brodie (1910-1978) was a leading 20th century theorist and philosopher of war. A key architect of American nuclear strategy, Brodie was one of the first civilian defense intellectuals to cross over into the military world. This thesis explores Brodie’s evolution as a theorist and his response to the technological innovations that transformed warfare from World War II to the Vietnam War. It situates his theoretical development within the classical theories of Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), as Brodie came to be known as “America’s Clausewitz.” While his first influential works focused on naval strategy, his most lasting impact came within the field of nuclear strategic thinking. Brodie helped conceptualize America’s strategy of deterrence, later taking into account America’s loss of nuclear monopoly, the advent of thermonuclear weapons, and proliferation of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Brodie’s strategic and philosophical response to the nuclear age led to his life-long effort to reconcile Clausewitz’s theories of war, which were a direct response to the strategic innovations of the Napoleonic era, to the new challenges of the nuclear age. While today’s world is much changed from the bipolar international order of the Cold War period, contemporary efforts to apply Clausewitzian concepts to today’s conflicts suggests that much can be learned from a similar endeavor by the previous generation as its strategic thinkers struggled to imagine new ways to maintain order in their era of unprecedented nuclear danger.acceptedVersio

Preventing Armageddon I: Enhancing America's Border & Port Security After 9/11; Strategic Insights, v. 3 issue 11 (November 2004)

This article appeared in Strategic Insights, v.3 issue 11 (November 2004)Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Dissuasion in U.S. Defense Strategy; Strategic Insights, v. 3 issue 10 (October 2004)

This article appeared in Strategic Insights, v.3 issue 10 (October 2004)Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Monterey Strategy Seminar: Day 1: Capabilities Based Planning.

Monterey Strategy Seminar: Day 1: Capabilities Based Planning. Day 2: Dissuasion in the U.S. Defense Strategy. Day 3: Global Strike WarfareNaval Postgraduate SchoolCenter for Contemporary Conflict (CCC

Tibetans Rise Up, as Hope Overtakes Fear on China's Western Front; Strategic Insights, v. 7 issue 2 (April 2008)

This article appeared in Strategic Insights, v.7 issue 2 (April 2008)Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Coalitional Insights A Post-Jihad Era? Arab Spring Brings West and Islamists into an Unexpected - and Potentially Transformative - Alliance

This article was published in Culture and Conflict Review (Fall 2011), v.5 no.3"With the Arab world continuing to experience an unprecedented wave of people-powered revolutions that caught both the West and its Islamist opponents in the War on Terror off guard, we are beginning to see the strategic principles articulated and successfully implemented by Gandhi in his liberation struggle against the militarily more powerful British raj supersede the more bellicose but perhaps less effective efforts by both terrorist and counterterrorist, insurgent and counterinsurgent, in their deadly but inconclusive dance. Tired of this long fight, and its endless use of force and violence by both sides with the civilian populace caught in between as if in a deadly vise, the popular mass of the Arab street has risen up to set things right, using methods overlooked by combatants on both sides, alienated as equally from the nihilistic violence of the terrorists as from the unholy alliance of the West with the repressive dictatorships which stood at the West's side, using Western funds and Western arms to repress their own people. Osama Bin Laden long sought to bring his war to the far enemy, and by striking fear in the hearts of the West, to cut off the benefactors of the 'apostate regimes' he sought to overthrow. And in many ways he has succeeded, putting into a motion a dynamic and cascading series of strategic interactions that empowered the very people he sought to liberate. The irony is, however, that these newly liberated peoples reject not only the tyrannies of these apostate regimes, but the Islamist vision and the violent means employed in the global jihad. What we are seeing, in short, is the start of the post-jihad era, where the polarized bifurcation of secular and Islamist is as unnatural and unsustainable as the ideological split that defined the Cold War.

Cold Front Rising: As Climate Change Thins Polar Ice, a New Race for Arctic Resources Begins by Barry Zellen; Strategic Insights, v. 7 issue 1 (February 2008)

This article appeared in Strategic Insights, v.7 issue 1 (February 2008)Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited