Oct. 14, 2021

Purpose-Built Antiarmor Teams: An Imperative for the Marine Corps Ground Combat Element

The Marine Corps has an “institutional misunderstanding of armor” that leaves its Ground Combat Element (GCE) ill-equipped to defeat the armored platforms that our peer adversaries employ. The Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF) has no active antiarmor doctrine and likewise lacks a purpose-built, ground-based antiarmor capability. The Marine Corps must establish modern antiarmor doctrine and restructure the training and equipping of Combined Anti-Armor Teams (CAATs) across the GCE to remain globally competitive across the full spectrum of conflict.

Oct. 14, 2021

Joint Doctrine Update

Joint Publications (JPs) under revision and signed within the past six months.

Oct. 14, 2021

Read the Manual: Reversing the Trends of Failure in NATO Humanitarian Interventions with Airpower

Alliance leaders should more heavily weigh insights from their own military doctrine when deliberating if and how to embark on another humanitarian intervention using airpower without a conventional ground force. At a minimum, such consideration should give NATO leaders a better sense of what is realistically possible with airpower. With this better sense, they should be able to make more effective decisions on, if, and how to use the military instrument to achieve humanitarian objectives if airpower is the most robust military means available to them.

Oct. 14, 2021

Proxy War: The Least Bad Option

If proxy wars will haunt the future, as Tyrone Groh suggests, then Proxy War will prove to be not only useful but also essential. Writing to policymakers and strategists, Groh offers many valuable considerations for clear and sober thinking about the employment of a proxy and, conversely, how to overcome a proxy threat.

Oct. 14, 2021

2034: A Novel of the Next World War

After 20 years of grinding war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon is trying hard to turn away from counterinsurgency in the Middle East to focus on deterring conventional conflict with Russia and China. Into this situation, Marine combat veteran Elliot Ackerman and retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis have dropped—with impeccable timing—a novel that imagines what could go wrong if that pivot fails to deter America’s near-peer adversaries.

Oct. 14, 2021

How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict

In a time with both a global pandemic and a U.S. Presidential election characterized by manipulated narratives, a fresh perspective contemplating disinformation—false information knowingly shared to cause harm—is both timely and important. A book, however, about how to lose the information war, as framed by author Nina Jankowicz, is exactly the perspective needed to highlight the high stakes and growing threat of disinformation.

Oct. 14, 2021

Wartime Innovation and Learning

The following case study details how one leader effectively integrated new operational concepts with a novel technological device to generate a capability in a combat theater. A collection of adaptations produced a new military innovation that was developed and tested incrementally and then applied in wartime. It is a great example of the integration of the research and development community operating forward in time of war to improve a new technology. A few insights regarding leadership and JPME can be drawn from this example. There are no detailed blueprints that we can draw upon for how to best exploit new technologies in every case, but history remains our best source for generating the right questions in the future.

Oct. 14, 2021

History of the Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

How the senior enlisted advisor to the Chairman (SEAC) position developed mirrors how other such senior enlisted advisor positions began and reflects the evolution of jointness.

Oct. 14, 2021

Green Fields of France: Mortuary Affairs in a Peer Conflict

Commanders must integrate realistic casualty expectations into their formations and institute plans that will minimize the impact of high-casualty conflicts on their ability to accomplish objectives. They can achieve this goal in three key ways. First, to lessen the blow of casualties sustained in a peer conflict, accurate casualty expectations must be part of formations’ training and organizational culture. Second, mortuary affairs cannot be a “hand wave” during training exercises; it must be exercised as a crucial function in maintaining a unit’s operational effectiveness in combat. Finally, planners must specify organic mortuary affairs capabilities within their organization that can be flexed to fulfill a need beyond what modern experience has demonstrated. Recent history has shown the implications of high-casualty events, and it is essential that American forces are prepared mentally and organizationally to win in the face of tragedy.

Oct. 14, 2021

Understanding the Vulnerabilities in China’s New Joint Force

This article analyzes PLA reforms and identifies vulnerabilities in China’s new joint force. The first section analyzes the changes to the Central Military Commission (CMC), the highest level of the PLA, set in the context of China’s model of national decisionmaking and civil-military relations. The second section considers the restructuring of the PLA, focusing particularly on its new Strategic Support Force (SSF) and revised theater-level organization. The third section explores the measures that could disrupt and defeat this new joint force via targeting the vulnerabilities identified in sections one and two.