Conversations on Strategy

Communications form the critical backbone of the modern world, connecting more people and more devices more completely than ever before. The benefits of this hyper-connected society drive ever-increasing reliance on secure, reliable, and resilient communications. Potential adversaries to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization certainly understand the importance of communications—those they seek to target and those they use themselves—so it is critical to fully understand the sector, the risks it faces, and the best ways to mitigate those risks. This podcast based on Chapter 9 in Enabling NATO's Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 1) provides a foundation from which to better understand the criticality of communications for national security and emergency preparedness and common important characteristics of the sector and their implications for security and resilience. Click here to read the book. Click here to watch the webinar. Keywords: critical infrastructure, communications, cyber threats, security risk assessment, crisis management Episode transcript "Communications Resilience" from Enabling NATO's Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 1) Stephanie Crider (Host) You're listening to Conversations on Strategy. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. Conversations on Strategy welcomes Chris Anderson, author of “Communications Resilience.” Anderson's, an incident management and infrastructure protection expert with three decades of government, military, and private-sector experience. He's currently the principal advisor for national security and emergency preparedness at Lumen. Welcome to Conversations on Strategy, Chris. I'm glad you're here. Chris Anderson Thanks for having me. Host You recently contributed a chapter to Enabling NATO's Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency. Your chapter talks about communications resilience, the backbone of the modern world, in your words. Give us an overview of the communication sector, please. Anderson It's really hard to overstate how important commercial communications is to government and military communications of all kinds. So, sort of the traditional national security kinds of things—command-and-control networks, intelligence sharing. Even highly classified information typically travels over commercial networks for a big part of its lifespan. But then as you start thinking even in more detail, things like civil preparedness, police, fire, EMS discussions, how you issue civil defense alerts to the civilian population, et cetera. On top of all that, communications is critical to economies and the citizenry in general. In the US, we've started this concept called national critical functions, which sort of distinguishes the inherently governmental functions from the other things the nation needs to be able to do in order to have a vibrant economy and support the government and keep citizens safe, et cetera. And comms is really central to a lot of those national critical functions. The sector itself is incredibly diverse. So when we talk about communications, and in the book chapter I talk about sort of the breadth of communications as encompassing sort of the traditional wireline services. You know, twisted pair copper and fiber optic cables that make up the old, you know, Bell telephone kind of networks that have now become the broadband connections that we all use in homes and businesses throughout the world. It also includes wireless communications. So wireless, you know, everyone thinks of 4G point-to-point5G cellular communications, but wireless also includes things like point-to-point, microwave and other uses of the radio frequency spe...

Released  6 January 2023 This podcast based on Chapter 1 in Enabling NATO's Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 1 answers the questions: What is critical infrastructure? Why is it important? What is the difference between critical infrastructure protection (CIP) and critical infrastructure security and resilience (CISR)? What are some of the key terms defined in national CISR policy? What are the core areas of activity or work streams involved in implementing CISR policy in and across the North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations? The answers to these specific questions provide the contextual basis for understanding why CISR is a quintessential societal task for maintaining national security, economic vitality, and public health and safety in a world filled with increasing levels of risk. For NATO member states, building and enhancing CISR at the national level is necessary to safeguard societies, people, and shared values and also provide the foundation for credible deterrence and defense and the Alliance's ability to fulfill its core tasks of collective defense, crisis management, and cooperative security. Click here to read the book. Click here to watch the webinar. Keywords: critical infrastructure, CIP, CISR, CBRNE, cyber threats, security risk assessment, crisis management Episode transcript "Understanding Critical Infrastructure" from Enabling NATO's Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 1) Stephanie Crider (Host) You're listening to Conversations on Strategy. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. Conversations on Strategy welcomes Ronald Bearse, author of “Understanding Critical Infrastructure,” featured in Enabling NATO's Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure and Resiliency. Bearse is an expert in critical infrastructure protection and national preparedness, with more than 23 years of experience in the US Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and Treasury. Ron, welcome to Conversations on Strategy. You recently contributed to a book, Enabling NATO's Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency. I'm looking forward to hearing about your chapter, but first, thank you for being here. Ronald Bearse Well thanks Steph. Yeah, I'm happy to discuss that with you today. Host What is critical infrastructure? Bearse Although there's no real global or standard or universal definition of critical infrastructure, most, if not all, European and NATO nations, which have a national CIP or CISR policy or national plan, define critical infrastructure as those physical and cyber systems, facilities, and assets that are so vital that their incapacity or their destruction would have a debilitating impact on a nation's national security, economic security, or national public health and safety. We kind of understand them (and most people do) as those facilities and services that are so vital to the basic operations of a given society 9like the one we live in) or those without which the functioning of a given society would be greatly impaired. In our book, for example, we talk about critical infrastructure sectors. Here in the United States, for example, we have 16 critical infrastructure sectors where assets and systems and networks, whether they're physical or virtual, are considered so vital to the United States that their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect on our national economic security or public health and safety. Those sectors include, here in the United States, and for most Western nations, the same types and same sectors, such as the chemical sector or the dam sector, commercial facilities. Communications sector. Critical manufacturing.

Released 19 December, 2022 In 2014 NATO's Centre of Excellence-Defence Against Terrorism (COE-DAT) launched the inaugural course on “Critical Infrastructure Protection Against Terrorist Attacks.” As this course garnered increased attendance and interest, the core lecturer team felt the need to update the course in critical infrastructure (CI) taking into account the shift from an emphasis on “protection” of CI assets to “security and resiliency.” What was lacking in the fields of academe, emergency management, and the industry practitioner community was a handbook that leveraged the collective subject matter expertise of the core lecturer team, a handbook that could serve to educate government leaders, state and private-sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure, academicians, and policymakers in NATO and partner countries. Enabling NATO's Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency is the culmination of such an effort, the first major collaborative research project under a Memorandum of Understanding between the US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute (SSI), and NATO COE-DAT. The research project began in October 2020 with a series of four workshops hosted by SSI. The draft chapters for the book were completed in late January 2022. Little did the research team envision the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February this year. The Russian occupation of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, successive missile attacks against Ukraine's electric generation and distribution facilities, rail transport, and cyberattacks against almost every sector of the country's critical infrastructure have been on world display. Russian use of its gas supplies as a means of economic warfare against Europe—designed to undermine NATO unity and support for Ukraine—is another timely example of why adversaries, nation-states, and terrorists alike target critical infrastructure. Hence, the need for public-private sector partnerships to secure that infrastructure and build the resiliency to sustain it when attacked. Ukraine also highlights the need for NATO allies to understand where vulnerabilities exist in host nation infrastructure that will undermine collective defense and give more urgency to redressing and mitigating those fissures. Click here to read the book. Click here to watch the webinar. Keywords: critical infrastructure, CIP, CISR, CBRNE, cyber threats, weaponizing critical infrastructure, security risk assessment, crisis management Episode Transcript: Enabling NATO's Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 1) Stephanie Crider (Host) You're listening to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production focused on national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. Decisive  Point welcomes Dr. Carol V. Evans, editor of Enabling NATO's Collective Defense: Infrastructure Security and Resiliency, which was published by the US Army War College Press in November 2022. Evans is the director of the Strategic Studies Institute and the US Army War College Press. She brings 30 years of expertise in the areas of mission assurance, crisis and consequence management, asymmetric warfare, terrorism, maritime security, and homeland security. Since 2014, Evans has been a lecturer at the NATO Center of Excellence for the Defense Against Terrorism in Ankara, Turkey, where she teaches its Critical Infrastructure Protection Against Terrorist Attacks training program. She holds a Master of Science degree and a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the London School of Economics. Thanks so much for joining me. I'm really excited to talk with you today. You recently edited a book for NATO, Enabling NATO's Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and ...

Released 21 September, 2022 This podcast explores urban warfare through the lens of modern warfare in  Ukraine. Keywords: Britain, Israel,  Ukraine, urban warfare, modern warfare Episode Transcript: “Urban Warfare”  Stephanie Crider (Host) Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. Conversations on Strategy welcomes John Spencer. Spencer currently serves as the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, codirector of the Urban Warfare Project, and host of the Urban Warfare Project podcast. He served over 25 years in the US Army as an infantry soldier, having held the ranks from private to sergeant first class and second lieutenant to major. He also currently serves as a colonel in the California State Guard, assigned to the 40th Infantry Division, California Army National Guard, as the director of urban warfare training. His research focuses on military operations in dense urban areas, megacities, urban, and subterranean warfare. Welcome to Conversations on Strategy, John. I'm glad you're here. (John Spencer) Thanks for having me. Host Let's talk about urban warfare. The US Army War College Press has published several pieces on this topic over the years. On a recent Urban Warfare Project podcast, you note urban warfare is the hardest. Can you elaborate on that? (Spencer) Sure. So I'm pretty adamant out of all the places you could ask military units to try to achieve strategic objectives, the urban operating environment is the hardest. Because, one, the physical terrain, right, which is complicated and hard in all areas—high elevation, you know, deep jungles—but the actual element of the urban physical terrain, the three-dimensional, the surface, subsurface, rooftops, the canalizing effect of the buildings, and the architecture of the city that reduce our military's or any military's ability to do what they want to do, right? So to do maneuver warfare, to use (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance or) ISR and long-range strike capabilities—it doesn't get negated; it gets degraded in the urban environment. So I think it is the hardest because of that complexity of that physical terrain. But, by definition, “urban” means there's people present. By our definition, the US military's definition, “urban” means that there's man-made terrain on top of natural terrain. There's a population, and then there's infrastructure to support that population. So with the presence of civilians in the operating environment in which militaries will be told to achieve objectives, the presence of civilians means that there will be a limit on the use of force. Because of the law of war, the international humanitarian law, (law of armed conflict or) LOAC, the different names that we use for it—since World War II and even all the way before World War II—most people think that in urban fights, like Stalingrad and, for us, Manila and Seoul—that was just a free range. There's always a limit on the use of force. So going into it, it's going to be harder for the military to use their form of warfighting because there's gonna be limits on the use of force. Of course, there's the three-block war, where soldiers and commanders will have to be fighting a peer competitor, at the same time dealing with humanitarian approaches and trying to get civilians out of the battle area, trying to save infrastructure. General (Charles) Krulak called it “the three-block war.” And then, of course, we often, when we envision urban warfare in massive operating environments that are urban, we think the civilians are just a hurdle or a concern to protect them.

Dr. Thomas F. Lynch III, Dr. Todd Greentree, and Dr. Conrad Crane – “Deconstructing the Collapse of Afghanistan National Security and Defense Forces” Released 12 September, 2022 The rapid collapse of Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) in August 2021 was widely anticipated and due to its structural constraints and qualitative decline from 2018–21. This article provides a targeted analysis of ANDSF operational liabilities and qualitative limitations, referencing often overlooked statements by US and Afghan political and military officials, data from official US government reports, and prescient NGO field analyses. The painful ANDSF experience illuminates several principles that must be considered as US policymakers turn toward security force assistance for proxy and surrogate military forces in conflict with the partners of America's emerging great-power geostrategic competitors—China and Russia. Click here to read the review and reply to the article. Keywords: Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), Taliban, Doha Accord, collapse, security force assistance  Episode Transcript: “Deconstructing the Collapse of Afghanistan National Security and Defense Forces” Stephanie Crider (Host)  Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. Conversations on Strategy welcomes Dr. Thomas F. Lynch III, Dr. Conrad C. Crane, and Dr. Todd Greentree. Lynch is the author of “Deconstructing the Collapse of Afghan National Security and Defense Forces” (“Deconstructing the Collapse of Afghanistan National Security and Defense Forces”), which was featured in the autumn 2022 issue of Parameters. Lynch is a distinguished research fellow in the Institute of National Strategic Studies (Institute for National Strategic Studies) of the National Defense University. A retired Army colonel with Afghanistan tours, Lynch publishes frequently on Afghanistan. Crane is currently a research historian in the Strategic Studies Institute of the (US) Army War College. A retired Army officer, Crane holds a PhD from Stanford University Greentree is a former US foreign service officer. Currently, he is a member of the Changing Character of War Centre at Oxford University, and he teaches at the Global and National Security Policy Institute at the University of New Mexico. Thanks so much for making time for this today. Tom, would you please just give us a brief synopsis of your article? (Thomas F. Lynch III) Yeah, hi, Stephanie. Thanks for having me here, and great to be with, uh, Con and Todd. I thought it was a good time to publish something that reviewed the history of why it was not surprising that the Afghan national military wound up where it is. And so my article kind of goes into that, focusing in three substantive areas. First, it's to define the fact that the Afghan military was never designed by the US and its partners to stand alone. There were critical capabilities that it would have required to stand alone against an autonomous insurgency with external patrons that were never present and could not have been expected to be present. Second, I thought it important to chronicle the fact that the important linkages between the Afghan military and, particularly, American support military structures—these were already pulling apart as early as 2018—not in the last year, not subsequent to the Doha Accord (Doha Agreement) of February 2020, but have been pulling apart pretty visibly for those that were paying attention, starting at least in 2018. So I kind of go through what those were as well. And then, finally,

Dr. Ariel Cohen and Dr. Robert Hamilton – The Russian Military and the Georgia War: Lessons and Implications Released 8 August, 2022 How does the war in Georgia in 2008 relate to the war in Ukraine in 2022? Join  Dr. Ariel Cohen and Dr. Robert Hamilton for an in-depth discussion, using their 2011 monograph, The Russian Military and the Georgia War: Lessons and Implications,  as a launching point. Click here to read the review and reply to the monograph. Keywords:  Russia,  Ukraine, strategy, 2008 Georgia War Episode Transcript:  Stephanie Crider (Host) Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy—a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs. Conversations on Strategy welcomes Dr. Ariel Cohen and Dr. Robert Hamilton, authors of The Russian Military and the Georgia War: Lessons and Implications, published by the US Army War College Press in 2011. Dr. Ariel Cohen is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Eurasia Center and a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (Council on Foreign Relations). He's a recognized authority on international security and energy policy and leading expert in Russia, Eurasia, and the Middle East. For more than 20 years, Dr. Cohen served as a senior research fellow on Russian and Eurasian studies and international energy policy at the Heritage Foundation. Dr. Robert E. Hamilton is a research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College, specializing in strategic competition and rivalry. Hamilton is a retired US Army Eurasian foreign area officer whose assignments included US advisor to the Ministry of Defence of Georgia, the chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation in (the US Embassy in) Georgia, (Department of Defense or) DoD Russia policy advisor to the International Syria Support Group in Geneva, the chief of assessments for the NATO Special Operations Component Command – Afghanistan, and the chief of the Russian De-Confliction Cell at Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve. In your 2011 monograph, The Russian Military and the Georgia War: Lessons and Implications, you cover the August 2008 conflict between Georgia and Russia. The war demonstrated Russia's military needed significant reforms, and it indicated which of those reforms were being implemented. I look forward to hearing about this—but first, thank you both for joining me today. (Ariel Cohen) It's a pleasure. This is Ariel Cohen. Host Ariel, please start us off and give us some background on the Georgia war of 2008. (Cohen) Let's start with the causes of the Georgian war. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a large part of the military security and intellectual establishment of the Soviet Union did not accept the outcome of the Cold War. They did not accept that, in fact, the Soviet Union failed in that competition. They also did not accept the fact that the Soviet empire, the incarnation of the Russian empire that predated the Soviet Union, collapsed, and they wanted to rebuild it. I saw the writing on the wall when I was traveling to Moscow in 1990s. There was a whole body of people who said that (Boris) Yeltsin; the last Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze—well, he was one before last, before (Alexander) Bessmertnykh; and Alexander Yakovlev, who led the anti-Stalin campaign—they considered these people traitors, as they did Mikhail Gorbachev, and the idea of reassembling the Soviet and Russian empire of the primarily Russian-speaking territories (but not only) . . . it percolated initially in the 90s and then got a much stronger impetus in the (Vladimir) Putin era. And I think when the alarm really should have sounded for the West was the Putin speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. We also saw such initiatives as then-President Dmitry Medvedev idea of new European security . . .

Mr. Phillip Dolitsky and Dr. Lukas Milevski – On “The Grand Strategic Thought of Colin S. Gray” Released 3 June 2022 In this podcast, Mr. Phillip Dolitsky and Dr. Lukas Milevski discuss the article "The Grand Strategic Thought of Colin S. Gray," which was published in the Winter 2021-22 issue of Parameters. Click here to read the review and reply to the original article. Key words:  Colin S. Gray, grand strategic thought, grand strategy, military strategy, military power Episode Transcript  Stephanie Crider (Host) Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors, and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. The guests in speaking order on this episode are: (Guest 1: Lukas Milevski) (Guest 2: Phillip Dolitsky) (Host) Conversations on Strategy welcomes Mr. Phillip Dolitsky and Dr. Lukas Milevski for a review and reply of “The Grand Strategic Thought of Colin S. Gray” by Dr. Lukas Milevksi, featured in the winter 2021–22 issue of Parameters. Dolitksy's thoughts on the piece appeared in the summer 2022 issue of Parameters. Milevski is an assistant professor at the Institute of History (Institute for History) at Leiden University. He is the author of The West's East: Contemporary Baltic Defense in Strategic Perspective, published in 2018, and The Evolution of Modern Grand Strategic Thought, published in 2016. Dolitsky is a master's student at the School of International Service at American University. Welcome to Conversations on Strategy. Lukas, it's a pleasure to see you again. Your article appeared in the winter 2021–22 issue of Parameters. Phillip wrote in to share his thoughts on it. Lukas, please start us off with a recap of the original article. (Milevski) The article engages intellectually with Colin Gray's grand strategic thought—a grand strategy being one of those concepts which he employed quite frequently, but he never really explored in a dedicated work. So I engaged with this thinking along a number of fronts, starting with a few basic, and sometimes mutually contradictory, definitions which he had used over the course of his career; then, certain casual conceptual overlaps—notably, among grand strategy, geopolitics, and strategic culture as well as, later in the article, also policy; and, finally and crucially, the inclusion of nonmilitary forms of power in grand strategy and the fungibility of these various forms of power, which related closely to certain problems of complexity in war. And war, of course, gets more complex once you're trying to coordinate various forms of nonmilitary power alongside military power as well. So in exploring Gray's grand strategic thought, the sense that I got is that for him, it represented what I called in the article the “agential context”: the context of what the rest of one's government or one side was doing to contribute to achieving success in war around the military effort because, ultimately, Gray's focus was usually military strategy, and his most prominent nonmilitary strategic theme was geopolitics. But he never really dedicated himself to exploring grand strategy. But, nonetheless, he did recognize its importance, and he was always conscientious in continually reminding his readers of the fact that it still mattered for them, whether in academic thinking and study or in actual strategic practice. And I'll end with that. (Host) Great. Thank you for the recap. Phillip, in your reply to Milevski's article, you noted two critical areas of Gray's thought that you feel like he left out. The first one was classical realism and Clausewitz. Can you speak to that for us? (Dolitsky) Sure. First of all, pleasure to be here,

Dr. Bettina Renz – Russia and Ukraine Released 8 April 2022. This podcast is inspired by Dr. Bettina Renz's 2016 Parameters article "Why  Russia Is Reviving Its Conventional Military Power." Dr. Renz revisits her original work and shares her insights on the current situation in Ukraine. Click here to read the article. Episode Transcript:  Stephanie Crider (Host) Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. The guests in speaking order on this episode are: (Guest 1: Bettina Renz)   (Host) Conversations on Strategy welcomes Dr. Bettina Renz, author of “Why Russia Is Reviving Its Conventional Military Power,” published in Parameters' summer 2016 issue. Renz is professor of international security at the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. She obtained her (master of arts or) MA and (master of science or) MSc in Russian studies at the University of Edinburgh and completed her PhD at the Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham. Welcome, Dr. Renz. Thank you for sharing your time with us today. I'm so glad you're here. Let's talk about your 2016 article “Why Russia Is Reviving Its Conventional Military Power.” In it, you note that this was about more than preparing for offensive action. Russia wants to be seen as a world power. Please lay the groundwork for our listeners and briefly walk us through your article.   (Renz) I wrote this article in the aftermath of the annexation of Crimea in 2014. And pretty much what I'm calling for in the article is that we need to view what is going on in Russia at all times really within more historical context—and, in particular, the annexation of Crimea and what happened afterwards—not as a sudden turnaround or an unexpected event. Because I think we encounter this problem quite often in Western assessments of Russia again and again. I think we are again in danger of making the same mistakes. There's a tendency to hyperbole when assessing Russian military capabilities and intentions. So, during the 1990s, there was very much the view in the West that Russia was finished as a global actor. It had a very weak conventional military. There was the assumption that Russia no longer had any ambitions in that respect, and it was only interested really in fighting small wars in its periphery and performed very badly there. Against this background and sort of lack of attention paid to Russia, the annexation of Crimea in 2014 came as a surprise to many. And then, assessments of Russia and of the military capabilities and ambitions pretty much flipped to the other extreme almost overnight. So all of a sudden, there was the assumption that Russia pretty much now had almost surpassed the United States or the West when it comes to military capabilities; a lot of focus spent by analysts, and so on, on new technology that the Kremlin and (Vladimir) Putin were propagating, like the hypersonic weapons and so on; a lot of emphasis on hybrid warfare as a major danger to Russia and to its neighbors. And now in 2022, of course, we have a clear escalation of the war in Ukraine that in fact has been going on since 2014. This is clearly a very offensive and aggressive military operation that has a very serious danger of escalation beyond Ukraine. But the focus seems to be, by many analysts now, on how poorly the Russian armed forces are doing operationally—even talking about the Russian military as a paper tiger and so on. So these assessments are not useful, and I deal with that in the article. In the article,

Released 6 April 2022. This podcast is based on a compendium that resulted from a conference on “Military Operations in an Urban Environment” cosponsored by the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce in conjunction with the Kentucky Commission on Military Affairs, the U.S. Army War College, and the Association of the United States Army. At the time of the conference, the concept of homeland defense was emerging as an increasingly important mission for the U.S. military. Click here to read the compendium. Episode Transcript: Soldiers In Cities  Stephanie Crider (Host) Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. The guests in speaking order on this episode are: (Guest 1: Michael C. Desch) (Host) Conversations on Strategy welcomes Dr. Michael Desch, editor of Soldiers in Cities: Military Operations on Urban Terrain, published by the US Army War College in 2001. A graduate of Marquette University, he holds master's and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago. I'm so glad you're here, Michael. Thank you so much for taking time to go through this with me today. (Desch) My pleasure. (Host) Military Operations on Urban Terrain: Please briefly walk us through the basic concepts of this monograph. (Desch) Military operations in cities is not a new topic. But the period of time in which we put together this collection of papers saw a renaissance of interest in the topic. It really was connected with a series of high-profile, urban operations that sort of reminded us all that operating in urban areas presented great challenges—challenges much greater and unique to those of military operations on other sorts of terrain. You know, the big thing on the American side, of course, was the famous Battle of the Bakaara marketplace (Battle of Mogadishu), chronicled in Mark Bowden's book Black Hawk Down: (A Story of Modern War). But there was also the First Battle of Grozny, in which the Russian military tried to suppress the Chechen uprising and felt that they had to do so, in part, by assaulting the capital of Chechnya, Grozny. Neither of these operations was pretty. And neither of them, I think it's safe to say, was fully satisfactory to the respective militaries involved. And so military operations on urban terrain became a hot topic. There was a lot of doctrinal attention to it. But also, at least in the United States, there was an effort to build or improve the infrastructure for (military operations on urban terrain or) MOUT training at various Army combat training centers and other Army facilities. I was at the University of Kentucky, in Lexington, Kentucky, at the time, and one of the US Army facilities that was investing in a significant upgrade of its MOUT training facilities was the (US Army) Armor School at Fort Knox in Kentucky. Why Kentucky and why MOUT? That was the reason that we undertook this study. (Host) Let's talk about military operations on urban terrain today. What did the monograph get right? (Desch) Well, military operations on urban terrain have been a pretty much consistent part of military operations in recent conflicts. So, most famous, during Operation Iraqi Freedom, were the operations in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. Today, we're seeing military operations in conjunction with the Russian special military operation in eastern Ukraine. And the Russian case is interesting both for instances in which the battle is taking place in urban areas, particularly in the southeast, in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, but also where, at least so far, they're not being undertaken,

Released 9 March 2022. Deterring a Chinese invasion of Taiwan without recklessly threatening a great-power war is both possible and necessary through a tailored deterrence package that goes beyond either fighting over Taiwan or abandoning it. This podcast explores cutting-edge understandings of deterrence with empirical evidence of Chinese strategic thinking and culture to build such a strategy and offers counter-arguments as well. Click here to read the original article. Episode Transcript:   Stephanie Crider (Host) Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. The guests in speaking order on this episode are: (Guest 1 Jared M. McKinney) (Guest 2 Peter Harris) (Guest 3 Eric Chan)   Host Today we welcome Dr. Jared McKinney and Dr. Peter Harris, authors of “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan,” featured in Parameters Winter 2021–22 issue. We are also pleased to welcome Mr. Eric Chan. Dr. McKinney is the chair of the Department of Strategy and Security Studies at the eSchool of Graduate Professional Military Education—Air University, and reviews editor of the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs. Dr. Harris is associate professor of political science at Colorado State University and Indo-Pacific perspectives editor of the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs. Mr. Chan is the senior Korea/China/Taiwan strategist with the Headquarters (Department of the) Air Force's Checkmate Directorate and a reviewer for the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs. He also serves as an adjunct fellow with the Global Taiwan Institute. Welcome to the inaugural episode of Conversations on Strategy. Let's talk about the China and Taiwan conundrum. Jared and Peter, your article, "Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan," proposes an unconventional approach to China's relationship with Taiwan. The article garnered worldwide attention, including from the (Chinese Communist Party or) CCP, which condemned the strategy. Jared, Peter, please give us a brief recap of your article.   (McKinney) Thanks for having us here today, Stephanie. The Taiwan conundrum is how to have great-power peace without abandoning Taiwan to Chinese domination and how to preserve Taiwan's independence without a great-power war. Is there a way out of this conundrum? Peter and I have argued that there is, and we've termed this approach “the broken nest.” Chinese leaders, even pathological ones like Mao, have long understood that grand strategy is all about balancing different vital interests. We took some inspiration for the strategy from a 1975 meeting Henry Kissinger had with Mao Zedong, in which Taiwan was discussed. Kissinger asked Mao when Taiwan would return to the mainland. Mao said, “In 100 years.” Kissinger replied, “It won't take 100 years. Much less,” and then Mao then responded, “It's better for it to be in your hands, and if you were to send it back to me now, I would not want it because it is not wantable. There's a huge bunch of counterrevolutionaries there.” This is the bottom line of the broken-nest strategy, to make Taiwan, given the (People's Republic of China's or) PRC's broader interests, “unwantable.” The phrase “broken nest” comes from a Chinese proverb that asks, “Beneath a broken nest, how can there be any whole eggs?” We designed this approach according to what political scientists call “deterrence by punishment” and the literature on tailored deterrence, which asks analysts to try to match techniques to a specific adversary. We proposed a tailored deterrence package composed of four elements. We argued, first,

Released 9 March 2022. Deterring a Chinese invasion of Taiwan without recklessly threatening a great-power war is both possible and necessary through a tailored deterrence package that goes beyond either fighting over Taiwan or abandoning it. This podcast analyzes the cutting-edge understandings of deterrence with empirical evidence of Chinese strategic thinking and culture to build such a strategy and the counter-arguments from  Part 1 of this series. Click here to read the original article. Episode Transcript:   Stephanie Crider (Host) (Prerecorded Conversations on Strategy intro) Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast's guest and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. The guests in speaking order on this episode are: (Guest 1 Dr. Roger Cliff)   (Cliff) Conversations on Strategy welcomes Dr. Roger Cliff. Dr. Cliff is a research professor of Indo-Pacific Affairs in the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College. His research focuses on China's military strategy and capabilities and their implications for US strategy and policy. He's previously worked for the Center for Naval Analyses, the Atlantic Council, the Project 2049 Institute, the RAND Corporation, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. (Host) The Parameters 2021-22 Winter Issue included an article titled, “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan.” Authors Dr. Jared M. McKinney and Dr. Peter Harris laid out an unconventional approach to the China-Taiwan conundrum. Shortly after the article was published, Parameters heard from Eric Chan, who disagreed with them on many fronts. We've invited you here today, Roger, to provide some additional insight on the topic. Let's jump right in and talk about “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan. What is the essence of Jared McKinney and Peter Harris's article “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan?”   (Cliff) So this article is an attempt to find an innovative solution to the Taiwan problem that has bedeviled the United States since 1950. In this particular case, the author's goal is not to find a long-term, permanent solution of the problem, but simply to find a way to deter China from using force against Taiwan in the near term. Specifically, a way that doesn't entail risking a military conflict between two nuclear-armed superpowers. Their proposed solution is a strategy of deterrence by punishment, whereby even a successful conquest of Taiwan would result in unacceptable economic, political, and strategic costs for Beijing. The premise of the article is that China's military is now capable enough that it could conquer Taiwan, even if the United States intervened in Taiwan's defense. The result, they argue, is that the long-standing US deterrence-by-denial strategy for deterring a Chinese use of force against Taiwan—in other words, by threating Beijing with the risk that a use of force against Taiwan would fail—is no longer credible. Unlike most strategies of deterrence by punishment, the strategy that McKinney and Harris proposed does not primarily rely on military attacks on China. Instead, the punishment comes in the form of imposing other costs on China for a successful use of force against Taiwan. This has several elements. One is the United States selling to Taiwan weapon systems that will be most cost-effective and defending against a Chinese invasion. This would make a successful invasion of Taiwan more difficult and, therefore, more costly for China. Related to this, they also recommend that Taiwan's leaders prepare the island to fight a protracted insurgency,