The Key to Strategic Effectiveness? Education, Education, Education!

A colleague from the United States' Army War College wrote this. This is an important issue, possibly the single most important issue, in the development of a strategically coherent and effective military organisation; obviously this follows from the last post, which argued that lethality does not necessarily confer strategic effectiveness. I have reproduced his commentary …

Should the SAF sacrifice its investments in military education to cut costs?

This post was inspired by a conversation I had last week with a good friend, who coincidentally happens to be a Reservist (sorry, I hate the term NSMan) LTC in the SAF and a principal staff officer in an infantry brigade. My friend is what I term a "true believer": he believes down to his …

Making the case for more, not less, discussion and debate within the SAF

Andy Dziengeleski and John McRae argue, on the Modern War Institute, that "it is only through a dialectical approach—a community of professionals engaging in a rational and logical dialogue—that innovative ideas are put forth, challenged, refined or synthesized, and applied." This is something I believe is absolutely needed in any armed forces, particularly in its …

The death of the “warrior ethos” and “military professionalism”

This follows from the preceding post regarding the HR McMaster speech. It is further inspired by a recent conversation I had with a former student, who has been working in the defence sector in Singapore for over a decade. This former student was recounting to me a conversation with a 2-star flag officer from another …

Why study history? A Chinese take on this question

This is a really fascinating piece I read recently, on why the Chinese study the period of their history known as the Warring States period. At one level, there is nothing interesting about this - after all, Stansfield Turner made all staff and students at the Naval War College read Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian …