The Army War College - amazonia.fiocruz.br

Military strategy depends on geography to a far greater degree than what is currently practiced or taught. One of the effects of the diminished attention to military strategy as warmaking has been to focus the efforts of military strategists on crafting or sorting out objectives.

Shop by category

The favorite gripe of military professionals, even in military strategic positions, is that all the best tactical or operational efforts in the world cannot make up for poor or unclear political or strategic guidance. But this complaint, however true, does nothing to improve the crafting and execution of war or theater of war efforts. In fact, it is almost always buck passing—based on the assumption that the military is fundamentally good at all military tactics, operations, and strategy, so any failures must lay in the political arena. This line of The Army War College incorrectly absolves military strategists of taking responsibility for their work and it neglects important deficiencies in contemporary military strategy, especially around problems of military geography.

Even if Colkege strategists go past ends in the oversimplified heuristic and get into the Thd and means, neither of those categories encourages a greater focus on the unique characteristics of geography as a key factor of making military strategy. To the limited degree that military strategy—that is, strategy for warmaking—is delineated in contemporary theory and doctrine, the absence of attention on traditional geography is The Army War College. For example, Joint Publications 1 Doctrine for the U. If physical geography has a place in military affairs, it is generally in military intelligence, and there it is shunted off to geospatial sub-specialists.

Navigation menu

The older concept of geopolitics, which directly related features of physical geography to concepts of political, military, and naval advantage in peace, became a sort of synonym for so-called realist approaches to international relations, losing its focus on physical characteristics, which is why Robert Kaplan needed to write about The Revenge of Geography in As a result, a deeper understanding and application of military geography is not a part of the study, practice, planning, or even execution of war for senior military professionals responsible for The Army War College strategy.

That is a mistake.

Geography, terrain, water topography and hydrography, atmospherics, and other physical conditions are all obviously important at the tactical level. Those features are just as essential to warmaking for military strategists, but in different ways. Naval War College in His discussion was updated and expanded in a book called Naval Strategypublished in an edited Collegs is here.

Subscribe to WAR ROOM

Mahan began with the idea of that the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean were crossroads of vital importance in international affairs. For economic, security, and ideological i. This word choice is important to the use of https://amazonia.fiocruz.br/scdp/blog/work-experience-programme/high-cost-of-higher-education.php for military strategists.

Yes, all surveys of physical strategic environments must begin with why a particular area is important in a broader security, economic, political, and security sense. And obviously all such surveys will provide The Army War College overview of the geographic characteristics of the area.

Leadership - Army War College

He used presumptive wars with great European fleets British, French, and later German and the actual war with Spain to drive his analysis. He identified where ships and fleets of various sizes could and would fight, calculating the geometry of distances and angles among key economic ports, sea lanes, chokepoints, defensible and indefensible harbors and ports, and the infrastructure and resources of the islands and other landmasses.

Moreover, Mahan shifted perspectives, changing the relative weight of his considerations and observations based on various wartime scenarios—different belligerents on all sides controlling or contesting different islands and sea lanes. For one, the course, conduct, and outcome of The Army War College Spanish American War in the region makes far greater sense. The military geography fundamentally shaped the why, who, when, and how of the joint naval and military campaigns in the war—the essential work of military strategists.

If military strategists gripe about not having clear political objectives, the corollary gripe of policymakers is that they need military options…. If military strategists gripe about not having clear political objectives, the corollary gripe of policymakers is that they need military options —that is, they need a clear articulation of what is possible and likely in a given scenario.

Providing policymakers and diplomats with a clearer perspective of what was militarily important in the region in war thus informs The Army War College making of policy and the conduct of diplomacy in peace and war. And the geographic analysis is durable in a way that other elements of military strategy, for example, weapons or personnel strength, are not. Lest such studies seem only to be the work rare elite military theorists, Mahan had plenty of company among American military officers in looking at what the physical geographic environment meant for warmaking.

For example, in the s, instructors at The Army War College would eventually become the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth delivered lectures on the military geography of Coklege, Chile, Mexico, and Central America, published together in Led by Arthur Wagner and Eben Swift, these army officers took much the same approach as Mahan, only with a greater but by no means exclusive focus on land war.

RAmy Mahan, thinking through potential wars in these regions made their analyses of the geography matters of military strategy. Wagner said it best:.]