By Ajit Maan, RealClearDefense: “Our tactics in the battles against Daesh in Raqqa and Mosul appear to be on the verge of success. But tactical success in battle will not win the war without a strategy. And that strategy will not be successful if it depends solely upon kinetic force. \”
The Age of Total War
By John Q. Bolton, Strategy Bridge: “Clausewitz tells us war is inherently unknowable, and once released it becomes an entity unto itself, transforming and growing without regard to the circumstances particular to its creation. But analysis requires categories, and most military professionals accept that war occurs on a continuum, a spectrum of conflict ranging from small-scale guerrilla warfare, to limited war, to conventional combat (force on force) by states leveraging all the elements of national power in a bid to defeat each other. And the period roughly ranging from the American Civil War to the end of World War II is clearly delineated in the scale, scope, duration, and government control of conflict.”
By G. Stephen Lauer, Strategy Bridge: ““Why do U.S. military outcomes after 1945 so often fail to achieve the policy objectives for which they are begun?” The chronicle of discontent is both powerful and pervasive in the American psyche today. The story of failure and lives lost with little meaning demonstrates the capacity, especially in the ongoing, and seemingly never-ending, Iraq-Afghanistan wars, to paralyze policy in regards to the threat of quasi-state organizations such as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), and indeed other existing nation states, in response attempts to overturn seventy years of the post-1945 peace settlement—the so-called Pax Americana. There are two fundamentally antagonistic matters at work here, the risk perceptions of the policy maker, and those of the military leaders given the task to achieve a limited aim with limited means.”