Introduction

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Notes

1 Mathieu Boulègue, Russia’s Military Posture in the Arctic: Managing Hard Power in a ‘Low Tension’ Environment (London: Chatham House, 2019).

2 On the Cold War dynamics of the High North, see Barry R Posen, Inadvertent Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Issues (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 155–61.

3 On the theoretical reasoning behind this assumption, see John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York, NY: W W Norton, 2001). Intentions certainly matter, but given their relative fluidity, are difficult to predict. By contrast, capabilities are relatively stable and can be used to predict the upper bounds of an actor’s ambition. States naturally gravitate towards this in an uncertain international environment in which it is difficult to ascertain intentions.

4 For a useful discussion of campaign analysis, see Rachel Tescott and Andrew Halterman, ‘The Case for Campaign Analysis: A Method for Studying Military Operations’, International Security (Vol. 45, No. 4, Spring 2021), pp. 44–83.

5 Andrew Illachinski, ‘Land Warfare and Complexity, Part II: An Assessment of the Applicability of Nonlinear Dynamics and Complex Systems Theory to the Study of Land Warfare (U)’, Center for Naval Analyses, 1996.

6 On this symbiotic relationship, particularly in Russian thinking, see Stephen R Covington, ‘The Culture of Strategic Thought Behind Russia’s Modern Approaches to Warfare’, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, Defense and Intelligence Projects, 2016, pp. 1–10.

7 For example, Eric Heginbotham et al., The U.S.–China Military Scorecard: Forces, Geography, and the Evolving Balance of Power 1996–2017 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2015).