Franz-Stefan Gady
Modern Warfare | Military Analyst | Author of ‘The Return of War’ & ‘How the United States Would Fight China: The Risks of Pursuing a Rapid Victory‘
Franz-Stefan Gady: One issue I see here is that the perception…
One issue I see here is that the perception of a transparent battlespace (IMO semi-transparent at best) paired with the notion of accelerated kill-chains is a further widening of the technical and tactical levels of warfare from the operational and strategic-political levels of warfare, which creates essentially two wars, and makes successful war termination harder. The combination creates a war-termination problem by structurally widening the gap between the technical-tactical levels of war and the operational and strategic-political levels. Precision warfare encourages planners to substitute the act of striking for a theory of how striking produces not only political but also operational-level outcomes. Transparent battlespace assumptions make this substitution feel somewhat doctrinally respectable, because if you can see everything and kill what you see, any problem appears to dissolve into a targeting problem. This could turn into a dead-end. Beyond the strike as strategy paradox Amos Fox & I outlined before, I think that adversaries will increasingly price into their military and political decision-making overwhelming inferiority in closing of kill-chains and defeat at the tactical level and adapt their force design, structure and doctrines accordingly to “ride out” this form of precision warfare and still prevail or at least not suffer defeats at the other levels of warfare.Franz-Stefan Gady: Beyond operational stagnation…
'Beyond operational stagnation, atomization has removed the military’s internal safety valves and heightened the risk of an unintended kinetic clash. The purge systematically replaced an entrenched old guard, who protected the status quo to preserve their patronage networks, with an echelon of terrified successors. This dynamic grants Xi greater latitude to order troops into combat. While these new commanders possess stronger technical credentials, they lack the political capital to act as a strategic braking mechanism. Stripped of the weight to stall or manage crises privately, this atomized officer corps no longer buffers political pressure or transmits honest assessments. Xi is left to make decisions in an information environment divorced from reality.'
16, April
Franz-Stefan Gady: Moscow is producing about 60 Iskander…
‚Moscow is producing about 60 Iskander missiles a month and has expanded its launcher capacity, while Ukraine lacks sufficient advanced air-defence systems such as the US-made Patriot system to cover the entire country, Skibitskyi said.‘
15, April