Welcome to the Autumn 2024 issue of Parameters. The Autumn issue consists of a special piece from the US Army War College commandant and provost on their strategic vision for the college, three In Focus special commentaries, three forums (Cooperative Partnerships, Professional Development, and Historical Studies), two regular forums (A Major’s Perspective and the Civil-Military Relations Corner), and a review essay focused on strategy in India.
Our In Focus feature includes three special commentaries. The first, “Avoiding the Escalatory Trap: Managing Escalation during the Israel-Hamas War,” by C. Anthony Pfaff, a contributing editor of the Parameters editorial board, describes how past escalatory cycles provide a path to avoiding regional escalation. “The Challenge of Next-Gen Insurgency,” by Steven Metz, also a contributing editor, argues that next-gen insurgency will be networked, swarming, global, and focused on narrative-centric conflict and integrated cost imposition and that social media and the virtual world will be its central battlespaces. The third special commentary, “A Long, Hard Year: Russia-Ukraine War Lessons Learned 2023,” by Michael Hackett and John Nagl, outlines the findings of the integrated research project team studying the second year of the Russia-Ukraine War.
The first forum, Cooperative Partnership, features one article. In “Why the Afghan and Iraqi Armies Collapsed: An Allied Perspective,” Colin Robinson, shows how the failures in Afghanistan and Iraq can be explained when the role of classical liberal thought on Western attempts to build strong armies in conflict-affected states is analyzed.
The second forum, Professional Development, contains two articles. In the first, “Restoring Priority on Cultural Skill Sets for Modern Military Professionals,” Daniel Henk and Allison Abbe claim that the Department of Defense has failed to distinguish and sustain cultural education relative to foreign language and regional expertise, putting servicemembers at a competitive disadvantage. The second article, “Operating Successfully within the Bureaucracy Domain of Warfare: Part Two,” by Jeff McManus, continues the discussion he began in the previous issue. He outlines the last 7 of 10 fundamentals (principles, perspective, prediction, persuasion, privacy, programming, and permanence) that policy professionals should consider when navigating the bureaucratic domain of warfare and maintaining trusted access to senior decisionmakers.
The third forum, Historical Studies, showcases two articles. Regan Copple, in “The Fallacy of Unambiguous Warning,” uses the case studies of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the Pearl Harbor attack to show how the Intelligence Community subfield of Indications and Warnings often simplified warnings into “ambiguous” and “unambiguous” that provided a false sense of security, leading to the incorrect interpretation and understanding of information received and the failure to identify warnings of impending wars. In “Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander: A Reappraisal,” Richard Hooker Jr. examines several strategic errors and missteps attributable to Eisenhower and uses them as a basis for assessing the qualities necessary for selecting successful leaders for theater command during wartime.
The Autumn issue concludes with two regular forums. In A Major’s Perspective, Brennan Deveraux discusses two tools available to researchers—the Annual Estimate of the Strategic Security Environment developed by researchers at the US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute and a special Military Review how-to issue created through a Harding Project / Army University Press partnership to revitalize the professional discourse process. In the Civil-Military Relations Corner, Carrie Lee focuses on the prevalence of retired general and flag officer endorsements of political candidates and the theoretical and empirical work needed to determine the best approach to developing policies that address this civil-military relations phenomenon.
Finally, in a review essay, Vinay Kaura analyzes two books focused on strategy in India that he feels are important reading for senior members of the defense community. ~CAP