Modern Military History

Dr. Robert Nelson and SGM Benjamin Pingel analyze Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk Oblast, launched on August 6, 2024, the first conventional ground invasion and sustained occupation of Russian territory by a foreign military since the Second World War. Many analysts had believed drones, sensors, minefields, and precision fires had locked the war into positional deadlock. Yet Ukraine’s 80th and 82nd Air Assault Brigades and 22nd and 61st Mechanized Brigades breached the border defenses and seized more than a thousand square kilometers, including the gas metering hub of Sudzha, within two weeks. The authors examine the campaign through the Army’s warfighting functions, tracing how command, maneuver, intelligence, fires, sustainment, and protection shaped its course. Russia’s response, including glide-bomb attacks, North Korean troops, and fiber-optic drones that could not be jammed, gradually reversed the gains. The lesson, they conclude, is that surprise and tactical skill cannot permanently overcome shortfalls in mass, logistics, protection, and air defense.

Cregg Cannon examines the Battle of Wanat on July 13, 2008, one of the most scrutinized small-unit engagements of the Afghanistan War. That morning, soldiers of Chosen Company, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade, fought off an intense, coordinated insurgent attack on Combat Outpost Kahler in the Waygal Valley. Cannon analyzes the battle through the principles of mission command. He shows how the outpost’s construction exposed structural vulnerabilities, including unfinished defenses, limited resources, incomplete intelligence, and terrain that favored the attackers. These systemic failures accumulated quietly, Cannon argues, and brought the outpost close to being overrun. Yet the battle is also a story of what went right. The paratroopers fought with courage, trusted one another, and acted on their own initiative, holding the position when everything around them seemed to fail at once. Wanat, he concludes, stands as both a warning about accumulated risk and a tribute to its defenders.

Cregg Cannon examines Operation Anaconda, fought in the Shah-i-Khot Valley of eastern Afghanistan from 2 to 10 March 2002, the first major ground battle of the Afghanistan War and an early test of the Army’s emerging philosophy of mission command. Planners under Major General Franklin Hagenbeck designed a hammer-and-anvil operation in which Afghan forces under commander Zia Lodin would sweep the valley floor and drive a small, demoralized enemy into American blocking positions. Instead, U.S. soldiers met between 700 and 1,000 well-prepared al-Qaeda fighters dug into the surrounding heights. Unreliable partner forces, flawed intelligence, and poor joint coordination caused the plan to collapse almost at once. Cannon shows how leaders at every level relied on commander’s intent, shared understanding, prudent risk, and disciplined initiative to adapt under fire, while special operations teams on Takur Ghar helped rebuild situational awareness. Their adaptability, he concludes, turned a near-disaster into a hard-won victory and helped embed mission command in Army culture.

Jeff Blanchard examines Operation Vigilant Resolve, the First Battle of Fallujah in April and May 2004, and argues that it was a turning point in the Iraq War. Launched hastily in response to the murder of four American security contractors, the operation went ahead even though commanders on the ground considered it inappropriate. Blanchard traces the background factors that hampered American planning and preparation, and the difficult street fighting in which Marines and Iraqi forces achieved real tactical successes. He shows how the coalition lost the information battle as Arab news outlets, including Al Jazeera, broadcast images of civilian casualties and destruction, and how that pressure led to a cease-fire and to Lieutenant General James Conway’s plan for a local Fallujah Brigade. The result was a strategic and political failure that fed instability across Iraq until forces launched Operation Phantom Fury against the city later that year. Blanchard closes by honoring the Marines and Fallujah’s suffering civilians.

Jeff Lillard examines one of the oldest strategies for controlling contested territory: building networks of fortified posts embedded among civilian populations. He compares three examples. Roman frontier forts, including those along Hadrian’s Wall, served as surveillance and patrol hubs and contributed to centuries of relative stability on imperial borders. The Strategic Hamlet Program in South Vietnam sought to concentrate rural populations in fortified villages to deny the Viet Cong support, but it collapsed after the 1963 coup against President Ngo Dinh Diem. Lillard shows that the 2007 surge in Iraq succeeded in part because Sunni tribal leaders aligned with coalition forces, while Afghanistan lacked strong local institutions to sustain decentralized security. His conclusion is that fortifications can produce local security, but durable stability depends on the political relationships that connect them to the societies they serve.

SGM Rene O. Aleman recounts a lesson in adaptability from his deployments to Iraq, where he was occasionally attached to a Military Transition Team, one of the small teams of U.S. advisors embedded with Iraqi security forces. As a Power Generation Equipment Repairer, Aleman had been trained to rebuild the Army’s standard generators in his sleep, and his task was to keep the generators at Iraqi Police checkpoints running. At the very first checkpoint, he found an aging French generator, and at the next, a German-made unit. Their control panels looked like the cockpits of 1920s aircraft, and he had neither the manuals nor the parts for such equipment. Aleman describes how he set aside the Army’s instructions, relied on the fundamental physics of engines, improvised repairs with whatever parts were at hand, and built trust with his Iraqi counterparts over cups of tea. The experience, he concludes, taught him that common ground and calm problem-solving can overcome barriers of language, culture, and training.

SGM Lucas W. Pedigo tells how his distribution platoon in Afghanistan solved a problem that was crippling its supply runs. In the winter of 2010–2011, Distro Platoon of Company E, 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, ran combat logistics patrols across Paktika Province to infantry companies on distant outposts. On the unimproved roads linking Forward Operating Base Sharana to Khushamand and Waza K’wah, covering fifty miles in twelve hours was normal, and the worst obstacles were the wadis, dry riverbeds whose loose sand swallowed heavy vehicles. A single crossing could take eight hours, leaving convoys exposed to insurgent attack. As the platoon sergeant, Pedigo noticed rolls of woven access mats lying unused near the airfield at Sharana and recognized their potential. The platoon practiced a repeatable method, assigned clear roles, and laid the mats across the worst crossing, cutting the crossing time to just over an hour. The episode, he concludes, shows how doctrine’s planning tools can help small units out-think the terrain and the enemy.

Alexandros Boufesis examines Operation Deliberate Force, NATO’s 1995 air campaign that helped end the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. After Bosnia declared independence in 1992, Bosnian Serb forces under General Ratko Mladić besieged Sarajevo, and the UN-designated “safe areas” proved anything but safe while NATO aircraft enforced Operation Deny Flight. The fall of Srebrenica and Žepa in July 1995, and the massacre at Srebrenica, became a wake-up call for leaders on both sides of the Atlantic. Boufesis traces how NATO expanded its mission into a sustained air campaign that began on August 30, 1995, using aircraft and Tomahawk cruise missiles against Bosnian Serb targets. He shows how this military pressure, combined with the diplomacy of Richard Holbrooke, lifted the siege of Sarajevo and produced the Dayton Accords. Boufesis also considers the campaign’s wider consequences, presenting it as a prelude to Operation Allied Force over Kosovo in 1999 and as a moment that reshaped NATO’s role after the Cold War.

SGM Antonio V. M. Pires, SGM Fabio Lusiani, and Mr. Robert Shawlinski of the Sergeants Major Academy offer a practical guide to the Correlation of Forces for senior leaders. In the military decision-making process, planners developing courses of action must assess relative combat power by comparing the strength, capability, and effectiveness of friendly and enemy forces. Doctrine treats this assessment as a starting point, but the authors argue that a fuller Correlation of Forces analysis produces better plans. They explain the Army’s methodology as a blend of measurable science and the art of experience and judgment. Using the calculator in the MDMP Trainer app, they show how Force Equivalents adjust raw ratios for unit capability and how scenario-specific loss estimation models refine the picture, in one example revealing that an apparently superior attacking force is actually outmatched. Artificial intelligence and decision-support tools can assist, they conclude, but senior leaders must understand the principles behind the numbers to interpret the results and make sound, timely decisions.

LtCol Richard Beil argues that former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was the “patient zero” of the current conflict in Ukraine. Borrowing the epidemiological term for the first carrier of a disease, Beil contends that after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Brzezinski was the most strident anti-Russian voice in the American foreign policy establishment, louder even than Henry Kissinger. Brzezinski, he writes, saw Russia’s problem not as one leader but as a permanent tendency toward expansionism and insecurity rooted in its history. Beil traces the influence of Sir Halford Mackinder’s Heartland Theory on Brzezinski’s thinking and the strategy set out in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, which Beil reads as a plan to encircle Russia, weaken it economically, and gain access to its natural resources through NATO enlargement. Beil concludes that the war in Ukraine must be understood through this thirty-year strategy, and that any national leader has an obligation to protect his country.

William E. Butler II explains how the Army Design Methodology can help leaders understand complex situations, using the Russo-Ukrainian conflict as his example. The methodology is a systematic approach to understanding, visualizing, and describing problems, and it begins with framing the operational environment by identifying the key actors, relationships, and dynamics that could affect a mission. Butler describes the operational variables planners use to build that picture and argues that framing the environment carefully before any American or European intervention is essential to success in large-scale combat operations. He contends that Russian planners failed to apply these principles before invading Ukraine, placing little faith in their tactical leaders and suffering a protracted war and heavy losses. The U.S. Army, Butler concludes, should learn from these mistakes, and senior enlisted leaders in particular must understand the methodology to help commanders anticipate challenges and integrate design into planning and training.

Jorge A. Rivera examines the tension between national sovereignty and the international responsibility to protect civilians, using NATO’s intervention in Kosovo as his case study. Genocide and ethnic cleansing, he notes, raise the question of when other nations may legally and morally intervene in a sovereign state. Rivera traces the historical roots of conflict in the Balkans and the rise of Slobodan Milošević, whose Serbian forces cracked down on the ethnic Albanian population and the Kosovo Liberation Army. He follows the escalating violence, including the massacre at Račak, the failed negotiations at Rambouillet, and the launch of Operation Allied Force on 24 March 1999. Rivera then examines the legal arguments for intervention, including the 1948 Genocide Convention, and applies an ethical decision framework using three different moral lenses. He concludes that international law mattered, but moral obligation played a major part, and that the United States and NATO were justified in acting to stop the persecution of Kosovo’s Albanians.

HD Bedell traces the evolution of American nuclear policy from the end of the Second World War to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. In the years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear weapons played a surprisingly small role in U.S. policy. Bedell argues that policy developed around two competing themes, preparation and disavowal. The first expression of disavowal was the Baruch Plan, which would have frozen the American monopoly in place and which the Soviet Union rejected. He then follows the shift to massive retaliation under the Eisenhower administration, the move toward flexible response, and the strategic thinking of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his civilian analysts, which led to mutual assured destruction. Bedell examines the SALT I negotiations and the ABM Treaty, arguing that the Soviet Union gained parity and superpower status while the United States received the illusions of détente and MAD. The pattern, he concludes, was one of conflict between those who believed in preparation and those who believed in disavowal.

Bob Seals traces the long history behind the crossed arrows worn by U.S. Army Special Forces. When Special Forces became a basic branch of the Army in April 1987, its new insignia revived a symbol first worn by the U.S. Indian Scouts in 1890, at the close of the American frontier. Seals tells the little-known story of First Lieutenant Edward L. Casey of the 22nd Infantry, the visionary officer who championed the Scouts, and his tragic death. He follows the arrows through their wear by the Scouts, their adoption by the First Special Service Force, the American-Canadian commando unit of the Second World War, and the repeated, unsuccessful attempts by Special Forces soldiers to win approval to wear them again in the decades that followed. Seals describes how this persistent advocacy finally succeeded in 1987, and how Special Forces warrant officers, who had worn the general warrant officer insignia, adopted the arrows in 2004. The story, he suggests, shows how deeply soldiers value the heritage that insignia convey.

MSG James F. Seifert Jr. examines how the contemporary operational environment of Afghanistan shaped the U.S. military and how those years may affect its readiness for future large-scale combat operations. For more than twenty years, American and NATO forces fought there with superior tactics, weapons, and numbers, yet relentless adversaries using primitive means combined with modern weapons were able to match or even overpower them at times. The enemy wore no uniforms and could be a farmer by day and a fighter by night. Seifert describes the conventional, unconventional, regular, and irregular elements of the environment and examines how mission command allowed leaders to adapt and provide real-time feedback to higher echelons. He argues that adversaries used the years America spent in the Middle East to learn, train, and modernize their own armies. The U.S. military, he concludes, must modernize quickly, adapt to new force structures, and apply the principles of war to prepare for the next fight.

MSG Garrett D. Roberson Jr. examines the Battle of Mogadishu in October 1993, one of the most intense urban battles of modern times, through the principles of mission command and the elements of command and control. Mission command rests on decentralized execution, empowering subordinates to exercise disciplined initiative within the commander’s intent. Roberson shows how Major General William F. Garrison set a clear intent for the raid to capture two key lieutenants of the Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, and how the operation was transformed when the MH-60 Black Hawk Super 61 was shot down over the city, followed by Super 64. He examines how leaders on the ground adapted to the chaos that followed, as well as the failures that compounded the danger, including a ground convoy that lacked clear directions to the target and relied on observers overhead to guide it through roadblocks and ambushes. The battle, he concludes, shows both the power of mission command and the need for continuous assessment and adjustment.

MSG Christopher S. Patel examines the South China Sea as a regional struggle with global consequences. The Chinese Communist Party, he argues, faces a containment problem: physical and geopolitical barriers, beginning with the First Island Chain running from Southeast Asia through the Philippines, Taiwan, and Japan, stand in the way of its ambitions to become a global economic superpower and the preeminent military power in Asia. No issue captures this better than the South China Sea, where China’s Nine-Dash Line claim conflicts with the maritime claims of six other governments. Patel traces how China has pressed that claim through small-scale military clashes, the intimidation of foreign fishing vessels, and the creation of military bases on artificial islands built on reefs and atolls while ignoring an international tribunal ruling against it. He weighs the responses of other powers and warns that adding more military force may increase volatility. Patel concludes that China will not abandon its claim and is prepared to push challengers to the brink of war.

HD Bedell offers a wide-ranging study of geopolitics and its enduring relevance. In the twentieth century, he observes, geography was an essential element of national security, alongside industrial technology and strategic resources. Yet the qualitative factors of territorial integrity, social and political systems, historical perspective, and religion were the real determinants of vital interests, and statisticians did not make good strategists. Bedell traces the development of geopolitical thought, from early political geographers who saw the state as a living organism and the ideas of Friedrich Ratzel, through Sir Halford Mackinder’s Heartland theory and its critics such as Nicholas Spykman, to the German school of Geopolitik associated with Karl Haushofer. He then applies these ideas to the late twentieth century, examining Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the continuing influence of its defense-industrial interests. Bedell concludes that geography and history still shape how states, Russia above all, perceive their security and ambitions.

Sergeant Major Clayton Dos Santos examines the Battle of 73 Easting, one of the most important tank battles of the 1991 Gulf War, in which the U.S. 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment engaged the Tawakalna Division of the Iraqi Republican Guard. He first sets the battle in context, tracing the events of July 1990 that preceded Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2 and the coalition buildup of Operation Desert Shield. Dos Santos then follows the regiment’s Ghost, Eagle, and Iron Troops as they advanced through sandstorms and high winds into Iraqi defenses arrayed along the map grid line that gave the battle its name. Thermal sights and other advanced equipment allowed American crews to detect and destroy the enemy in poor visibility, navigate without landmarks, and seize the initiative. Drawing on accounts such as H. R. McMaster’s, he concludes that realistic training, confident soldiers, mission command, and technological superiority combined to make 73 Easting an enduring example of best practices in military operations.

Comer Plummer recounts the Annual Disaster of 1921, a catastrophic Spanish defeat in northern Morocco. On the evening of July 21, Spanish officers at Annual realized they were trapped in a narrow valley surrounded by mountains, their forward outposts lost and tribes in their rear joining the rebellion. The crisis had begun on June 1, when the Riffians, Berber tribesmen of the Rif Mountains led by Mohammad Abd el-Krim al-Khattabi, began attacking Spanish positions. Plummer explains why a Spanish army that looked overwhelming on paper was poorly trained, ill-equipped, and ignorant of the country it occupied, and how General Manuel Silvestre’s overextended advance invited catastrophe. He follows the collapse of the camp, the disastrous retreat, Silvestre’s mysterious death, and the siege of Mount Arruit, where General Felipe Navarro and about 3,000 men took refuge. Plummer then traces Abd el-Krim’s Rif Republic, his influence on later revolutionaries such as Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara, and his enduring legacy in Morocco.

Edward J. Langer reexamines the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 and asks whether Nikita Khrushchev was bluffing about Soviet nuclear strength. The crisis began when a U-2 reconnaissance flight over Cuba photographed launch sites under construction for offensive missiles. Langer explains that Khrushchev feared the United States held a commanding lead in nuclear-armed missiles aimed at the Soviet Union and sought to even the odds by placing intermediate-range missiles and support troops in Cuba, shipping them under false cargo documents. He describes the backdoor talks between Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that resolved the crisis, with the Soviets removing their missiles in return for the later removal of American Jupiter missiles from Italy and Turkey. Langer notes that Khrushchev seemed to give up his position too easily, and he examines the Soviet missiles available at the time, the R-7, R-12, and R-14, including the limitations of the R-7, which required nearly a full day to prepare and could not remain on the launch pad for long.

Bryan Dickerson, a Navy veteran who served at Al Asad Air Base in 2005 and again in 2009–2010, traces the base’s history and its role in Operation Desert Storm. From 2004 until 2011, Al Asad, in Iraq’s western Al Anbar Province, was one of the most important coalition air bases of Operation Iraqi Freedom, operated mainly by the U.S. Marine Corps. Its story began in the mid-1980s, when Saddam Hussein’s government had Yugoslav contractors build the base, originally named Al Qadisiyah, drawing on lessons learned in the Iran-Iraq War. Dickerson describes its design, including hardened aircraft shelters that were among the most resilient in any air force, and the squadrons of MiG-25 and MiG-29 fighters based there. He then follows the coalition air campaign of 1991, in which aircraft braved concentrated anti-aircraft fire to strike the base with precision-guided bombs and missiles, demolishing its shelters within a few days and knocking its Iraqi Air Force units out of the war. Concrete and steel, he concludes, proved no match for precision-guided munitions.

Bill Wilson examines the Fulda Gap, the corridor in central West Germany where the U.S. Army expected the first battle of a Third World War to be fought. He opens with “Lariat Advance,” the alert code that sent American soldiers racing to their units in the early hours, never knowing whether the threat was real. Wilson explains the geography that made the gap a natural invasion route toward Frankfurt and the Rhine, and the responsibilities of the U.S. V Corps and its armored cavalry regiments, including the 11th and 14th, which watched the border from posts such as Observation Point Alpha, while VII Corps in Bavaria focused on the Hof Gap. He details the Soviet forces arrayed against them, including the 8th Guards Army, and the forces each side could bring to bear. Wilson then considers how such a battle might have unfolded. Whatever the outcome, he concludes, the battlefield would have been littered with thousands of destroyed armored vehicles, carnage suggested on a smaller scale by the 1973 battle in Israel’s Valley of Tears.

Evan Pilling examines T.E. Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia,” as a master of asymmetric warfare. Books, films, and Lawrence’s own sense of mystery have clouded the reality of the man, but Pilling argues that his record as British liaison to the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks from 1916 to 1918 offers a dramatic example of irregular warfare. Drawing on his knowledge of the region and its people, Lawrence served as political advisor to the Arab field commander Feisal and led Arab forces himself. Pilling follows the campaign’s strategic vision of threatening the Hejaz Railway, which ran 800 miles from Damascus into the Arabian Peninsula, and its most dramatic success, the surprise capture of Aqaba in July 1917. Although a sideshow in the larger war, the revolt tied down Ottoman forces out of proportion to its size and supported the British victory in Palestine. Pilling also examines the principles of irregular warfare Lawrence set out in Seven Pillars of Wisdom and other writings, which he argues remain relevant to insurgents and counterinsurgents alike.