From the editors

As this first 2024 issue of The Journal of Strategic Studies enters publication, wars in Ukraine and Gaza are reaching points where all sides must reassess the potential for victory or even meaningful strategic success and weigh them against the likely costs of continued warfare. The United States faces an election year, with domestic politics posing complicated challenges to traditional U.S. foreign policy concerns. Information security, space and cyber operations, and artificial intelligence will all impact the entire spectrum of international competition, from domestic politics and elections to high-intensity conventional warfare.

This year’s Amos Perlmutter Prize for best article submitted by a junior faculty member has been awarded to Aaron Bateman of the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. His ‘Information Security in the Space Age: Britain’s Skynet Satellite Communications Program and the Evolution of Modern Command and Control Networks’ examines the challenges Great Britain faced in trying to develop an affordable secure communications network during the Cold War. Bateman argues that although Britain lacked the resources to develop an independent space capability and therefore had to rely on American assistance and access, it still insisted on operational control over the satellite resources it needed. In this respect, Britain continued a much longer strategic tradition of using information networks to project power across the globe, even as its colonial empire and access to bases eroded.

Next, Dimitri Minic of the Russia/NIS Center, French Institute of International Relations (IFRI) examines the roots of the Russian army’s performance in the ongoing war in Ukraine. In ‘How the Russian Army Changed its Concept of War, 1993–2022’, the author suggests that the failure of Moscow’s ‘special military operation’ has its roots in post-Cold War Russian military theoretical debates about the nature and character of 21^st century war.¹ As Minic notes, many of the revisionist beliefs that influenced this debate were based on views profoundly disconnected from reality, leading Russian elites to overestimate the ability of indirect means to achieve political goals, which in turn led to a policy-strategy mismatch in Ukraine.

In the next article, Robert S. Wilson and Russell Rumbaugh of the Center for Space Policy & Strategy examine recent U.S. decisions to disaggregate nuclear from non-nuclear spacecraft. In ‘Reversal of Nuclear-Conventional Entanglement in Outer Space’, they discuss the potential risks and consequences of this policy shift. They also note that it was not the result of a senior-level strategic choice or debate, but more likely the product of acquisition reforms that allowed senior leaders to be bypassed.²

Analysts of cyber conflict often anticipate massive incapacitating ‘bolts from the blue’. Cameron L. Ross of the Air Command and Staff College analyzes the historical development of conceptions about cyber operations and planning. In ‘Going Nuclear: The Development of American Strategic Conceptions about Cyberconflict’, he notes that many of the key themes are the result of advocates focusing on doomsday scenarios or the contemporary national security priorities in an effort to garner support for greater research and funding. The result affects frameworks, authorities, and operations, but remains based on hypothesis, may understate the very real limits to achieving massive strategic effects, and may ignore other less dramatic but more achievable options available to our adversaries.³

Finally, Cameron Hunter and Bleddyn E. Bowen of the School of History, Politics and International Relations at the University of Leicester examine claims that artificial intelligence (AI) will take over autonomous command responsibilities. AI optimists, they argue, are anti-Clausewitzian, basing their logic on narrow empirical and epistemological foundations and a fundamental misunderstanding of war itself. In ‘We’ll never have a model of an AI major-general: Artificial Intelligence, command decisions, and kitsch visions of war’, they demonstrate that command in war requires a mix of abductive and inductive logic, and that AI relies entirely on the latter – an inherent limitation that cannot be solved by applying more computing power.⁴

In addition, this issue features book reviews by Beatrice Heuser and Huw Bennett.

– The Editors

Notes

¹ See Dmitry Adamsky, ‘From Moscow with Coercion: Russian Deterrence Theory and Strategic Culture’, Journal of Strategic Studies 41/1 (2017), 233–60. 10.1080/975 01402390.2017.1347872.

² See Aaron Bateman, ‘Mutually Assured Surveillance at Risk: Anti-Satellite Weapons and Cold War Arms Control’, Journal of Strategic Studies 45/1 (Jan. 2022), 119–42. 10.1080/01402390.2021.2019022; Thomas J. Christensen, ‘The Meaning of the Nuclear Evolution: China’s Strategic Missile Force Modernization and its Implications for the United States’, Journal of Strategic Studies 35/4 (Aug. 2012), 447–87.10.1080/01402390.2012.714710; James M. Garrett, ‘Nuclear Weapons for the Battlefield: Deterrent or Fantasy?’, Journal of Strategic Studies10/2 (1987), 168–88. 10.1080/01402398708437295; David C. Logan, ‘Are They Reading Schelling in Beijing? The Dimensions, Drivers, and Risks of Nuclear-Conventional Entanglement in China’, Journal of Strategic Studies 46/1 (Nov. 2020), 5–55. 10.1080/01402390.2020.1844671; Joshua Rovner, ‘Two Kinds of Catastrophe: Nuclear Escalation and Protracted War in Asia’, Journal of Strategic Studies 40/5 (2017), 696–730. 10.1080/01402390.2017. 1293532; Paul Stares, ‘Space and US National Security’, Journal of Strategic Studies 6/4 (1983), 31–48. 10.1080/01402398308437166.

³ Other recent work on cyber topics includes Samuel Zilincik and Isabelle Duyvesteyn, ‘Strategic studies and cyber warfare’, Journal of Strategic Studies 46/4 (2023), 836–857. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2023.2174106; Richard J. Harknett and Max Smeets, ‘Cyber campaigns and strategic outcomes’, Journal of Strategic Studies 45/5 (2022), 534–567. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2020.1732354; Jacquelyn Schneider, ‘The capability/vulnerability paradox and military revolutions: Implications for computing, cyber, and the onset of war’, Journal of Strategic Studies 42/6 (2019), 841–863. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2019.1627209; Lennart Maschmeyer, ‘A new and better quiet option? Strategies of subversion and cyber conflict’, 46/3 (2023), 570–594. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2022.2104253; and Alex S. Wilner, ‘US cyber deterrence: Practice guiding theory’, Journal of Strategic Studies 43/2 (2020), 245–280. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2018.1563779.

⁴ Kareem Ayoub and Kenneth Payne, ‘Strategy in the Age of Artificial Intelligence’, Journal of Strategic Studies 39/5–6 (2016), 793–819; Andreas Herberg-Rothe, ‘Clausewitz’s Concept of Strategy – Balancing Purpose, Aims and Means’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 37/6–7 (2014), 903–925; James Johnson, ‘Delegating strategic decision-making to machines: Dr. Strangelove Redux?’, Journal of Strategic Studies 45/3 (2022), 439–77.