Polish perspective on psycho-informational war conducted by Russian Federation

PWSZ University in Suwalki, Poland

Lt Col (r) Piotr PACEK PhD

The primary objective of this paper is to show a Polish view of psych-informational warfare conducted recently by Russian Federation in Europe. It highlights that the information warfare, which includes psychological operations, has lately become the core element of warfare theory and practice. By presenting the effectiveness of Russian actions in Ukraine or Poland, it shows the complexity of modern forms of influencing the enemy and the transformation of international security environment in general. It provides the characteristic and the significance of psychological and informational actions in the modern world, going beyond typical military, diplomatic or propaganda actions.

Author points out that Russian actions are directed not only at Crimea, Donbas or Ukraine but also at US, NATO and EU. Aiming at the position in the world, to remain a powerful international leader and hegemony in the world. Author forms hypothesis that there is a vital need to adjust the security system to new challenges. Moreover it is necessary to make amendments in doctrinal documents and to prepare armed forces to be able to counter new threats.

Can Strategy be taught?

LtGen Robert Schmidle (ret) Ph.D.

The purpose of teaching strategy is to develop designers not craftsman. The craftsman’s skills can be taught like the tactics to which Lawrence referred. The designer, on the other hand requires an interdisciplinary education. That education is a holistic process, which is conducted horizontally, not vertically and begins with incorporating the tenets of design thinking. Among the more relevant of those tenets are: honestly confronting the facts, breaking through the noise to discover what is truly important and scaling for impact at an appropriate time and place.

Swedish and Finnish strategies in a historical context

Karlis Neretnieks

The Art of Strategic Thinking

Dan Schueftan

The MAD Syndrome   

(for Mutually Assured Destruction)

Erik Durschmied

Emerging technologies in the field of logistics

Andreas Alexa

This article focuses on the description of emerging technologies in the field of logistics and the implications to the support und the sustainment of military operations in the year 2040.

Although the future is not predictable and it is a view into the glass ball, there will be significant changes in the next 20 years. Some of the new technologies, which are currently only thought by science-fiction authors and forward thinking enterprises, will not be carried out, others however will be implemented in the civil world and therefore will have an impact in the conducting of military operations.

“The Cycles of Navy Strategy”

Donald Abenheim

The long era of expanding U.S. defense-budgets from 2002 until 2010 unfolded with much debate over the best ways to employ Naval forces in the Global War on Terror and in the effort to create stability in Iraq. As the United States emerged from the decade-long campaign to eliminate Osama bin Laden and to crush al-Qaeda, however, Navy leaders discovered that the international and domestic political landscape had changed. Demobilization and austerity, highlighted by sequestration of the Department of Defense budget, now loomed large in American domestic politics.

Strategic Thinking in the Era of Cultural Wars

Dan Schueftan

Modern war presents an embarrassing challenge to modern powers resting on a robust social, economic and military infrastructure. This brings an essentially open society to a profoundly different battlefield that sanctifies human life and is devoted to the promotion of the quality of life on the one hand, with societies that are, to different degrees, tribal, authoritarian and dysfunctional, on the other. The latter very often failed to meet the challenges of the modern era, and are unwilling to pay the cultural price of the transformation required for securing a better future for their children that predominantly is the adoption of pluralistic values and practices, specifically female equality.

High Politics - rule geography, military structure and power structure: an overview of the object area

Clemens Eicher

A problem area may be defined simply as a bundle of several possible design options for a particular slice of reality applicable to contacts with the target systems of States in a diverging mode. A problem thus defined enters the policy area, if governments put it on their agenda and thereby initiate a policy cycle, which entails international decision-making, implementation and revision.

The 2016 EU ‘Global Strategy’: Consequences for European Force Structures

Jan Willem Honig

When one surveys successful grand strategy statements of the not-so-distant past and compares these with the EU’s new ‘Global Strategy’,one basic difference catches the eye. Whether secret –– like the 1950 Report to the US National Security Council known as NSC68, or public –– like NATO’s 1967 ‘Report of the Council on the Future Tasks of the Alliance’, known as the Harmel Report, they either explicitly contained or quickly permitted the central tenet of the proposed strategy to be captured in a catch-phrase: ‘containment’ and ‘defence and détente’.