Image of massive tunnel bomb exploding at Syrian army base; courtesy of Reuters (Credit: Khalil Ashawi). Note: We’re revisiting some of our most popular material from the past 10 months for our newer readers; this was originally posted May 21, 2014. Enjoy! The other day I had a valuable email back-and-forth with a professional acquaintance on…
Image of Camp Funston, Kansas (USA), US Army base, 1918 provided courtesy of Wikipedia. There are three conclusions for the military profession to be drawn from the present Ebola outbreak: the threat is enormous, but ultimately manageable; the desired ends are currently vastly under resourced; and the profession’s lack of intellectual focus on the…
Image courtesy of the New York Times. In his famous 1998 set of BBC Radio Reith lectures, military historian Sir John Keegan described war as a “protean activity” that “changes form, often unpredictably” like a “disease” that “exhibits the capacity to mutate and mutates fastest in the face of efforts to control or eliminate it.”…
West Point cadets departing in June 1919 for summer study on European battlefields. *Note: This essay is based on remarks to be delivered on Tuesday, 19 August 2014, at the Defense & Strategic Studies War Council event, “Summer Wars: ISIS, Ukraine, and Gaza.” The Oxford historian Margaret McMillan recently related a story taken from the opening scenes of…
Image couresy of Wikimedia Commons. Note: I recently received this prompt from a friend working in the New Zealand government – and thought I’d try my own response. If you’re interested in the subject, consider submitting it to the War Council. Hey Matt, a work related question for you. According to open source reporting the Egyptian…
Image courtesy of Investorstemcell. I’m in Riga, Latvia this week as part of a West Point Department of Military Instruction training team detailed to assist the Latvian National Defence Academy in curriculum development. The team has been here since Sunday, February 23rd, and will depart on Friday, February 28th. As usual with these sorts of things,…
Photo of old U.S. Embassy in Tehran by Flikr user bashem. **Reader’s Note: These are Major Matt Cavanaugh’s remarks from the October 2013 War Council event on U.S. options toward the Iranian nuclear program. The full event remarks are available at Small Wars Journal. His prompt was to engage with “military strategic considerations.”** Academics and opinion writers engage military…
Indonesia’s Tropical Islam P. 244: “With well over 200 million of its 240 million inhabitants Muslim, Indonesia represents one of Islam’s greatest proselytizing success stories. This is particularly remarkable because Islam came to Indonesia not through military conquest as it did almost everywhere else, from Iberia to the Indian Subcontinent, but, starting in Aceh in…
Reading books is a good thing; it is better to study important books. Robert Kaplan’s new book, Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, (Random House, NY: 2010) about what he perceives as the Indian Ocean’s central role in the future of geopolitics is a book to study. He makes a number…