For over a decade, The Strategy Bridge has helped to lead a conversation among practitioners, scholars, and students about strategy, national security, and military affairs. Written early in 2013 our guiding principles reflect what we have always tried to do here.  Writing and strategy are communal affairs. We exist to develop a community of thinkers and writers who seek to improve the level of discussion in these areas. By creating this community, we will support the authorship of quality content in the areas of policy, strategy, and military affairs. By creating this community, we ..read more

Vasily Vereshchagin (Wikimedia) The Russian invasion of Ukraine continues, and examining Russian culture is still a minefield since Russia launched its February 2022 Special Military Operation. Concerts featuring the music of famous Russian composers came under fire.[1] Ballet tours were shuttered.[2] Russian art and cultural exhibitions were questioned, postponed, or canceled.[3] Russian food and drink came under scrutiny, with bar owners dumping bottles of vodka into storm drains for social media.[4] Competing images of stalwart Russians supporting Putin and the Russian occupation saturated ..read more

“If I must make war, I prefer it to be against a coalition.” –Napoleon[1] Two months after the collapse of Kabul, NATO published a fact sheet on lessons learned from its experiences in Afghanistan that proclaimed, “NATO’s engagement in Afghanistan demonstrates the immense strength of Allies working in pursuit of a common goal.”[2] This statement seems to imply that NATO somehow succeeded in Afghanistan by holding itself together politically. This statement is indicative not just of how coalitions of states conduct war, but more importantly by how multinational organizations do so. Much of th ..read more

Thomas Crosbie and Anders Klitmøller How should senior military officers in democratic states influence their domestic political environments? The flippant answer is that they should not; they should do as they’re told. The American civil-military relations literature, written largely in the shadow of Samuel P. Huntington’s myth of an apolitical military, has consistently downplayed the positive role officers play in politics, to such a degree that we have only a dim outline of what constitutes appropriate and effective political influence by officers Thus, in practice, we fear that too many o ..read more

Super Bowl XXV marked a high point in the relationship between the average citizen and the United States Armed Forces. The January 1991 game—best remembered for Scott Norwood’s field goal attempt missing wide right, leaving the Giants victorious, and starting an impressive streak of futility for the Bills—took place less than two weeks after the air campaign of Operation Desert Storm began. Throughout the night, the nascent war threatened to upstage the game itself. Whitney Houston delivered a classic performance of the national anthem in front of a sellout crowd in Tampa, each of whom waved a ..read more

ESSAY TEXT HERE #TheBridgeReads Buy on Amazon Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America's Misguided Wars. Edited by Andrew Bacevich and Daniel A. Sjursen. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2022. Read a review from Tim Bettis here: Despite its omissions, Paths of Dissent is an exceptionally substantive and moving book for anyone interested in personal accounts at the intersection of ethics and military service…As America exits another costly decades-long counterinsurgency era  into an uncertain future, it  requires courageous dissenters…to avoid national security malpracti ..read more

U.S. military use of machine learning in intelligence products enjoins the military, the state, and its citizens in a sprawling public-private sector digital ecosystem, including the digital data supply chains relied on for model training. Arguments for and against the applicability of machine learning in these products are dominated by technical, legal, ethical, and organisational issues, which often obscure a fifth obstacle that trumps them all. The obstacle is institutional. It involves the transgression of the normative element of what the military does—its primary purposeful activity—via ..read more

Buy on Amazon The recent coups in sub-Saharan Africa have ushered in a new era in civil-military relations in the Francophone states of the continent. While military intervention and insurgency have long been a feature of politics in the region since decolonization, the quick succession of regime change and the seizure of power by a new generation of juntas against long standing personalist dictatorships suggests a break in previous political patterns. And this is especially true in light of assumptions that have informed thinking since the Third Wave of Democratization at the end of the Cold ..read more

It has been more than thirty years since the Romanian Revolution of 1989 brought the army into the streets. Thankfully, it now poses no danger to democratic governance and is not threatening to seize political power. But after almost twenty years of NATO membership, defense planning and procurement still occurs with limited civilian oversight. And this has persisted without drawing much notice from academics working on civil-military relations.[1] Conceptually speaking, almost all analysis here can be thought of as addressing some species of the principal-agent problems that arise from misalig ..read more

Stephen M. Saideman, Philippe Lagassé, and David Auerswald In most democracies, legislatures have far less oversight power over their militaries than we might expect. The U.S. Congress and its relationship with the American armed forces is the exception, rather than the rule. Indeed, many legislatures around the world lack some of the basic instruments required to understand what their armed forces are doing, notably security clearances, subpoena power, and adequate staffing. In this article, we address the hypothesized role for legislatures in democratic civil-military relations and then demo ..read more