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Though discounted by Clausewitz in the circumstances of his era, strategic surprise has enjoyed considerable popularity over the past century. The possibility of achieving decisive results from attacks launched on short, or zero, warning has appeared to improve greatly with advances in technology. It follows that surprise has been recognized as offering what seem to be both golden opportunities and lethal dangers. Since surprise is an ironbound necessity for the tactical success of terrorism, it is understandable that it attracts a major degree of attention today. There is no real novelty about this. After all, for 40 years the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies perpetually worried about surprise attack on the Central Front in Europe, as well as about a surprise first strike designed to disarm the United States of its ability to retaliate with its strategic nuclear forces.
The scope and applicability of risk management have expanded greatly over the past decade. Banks, corporations, and public agencies employ its new technologies both in their daily operations and long-term investments. It would be unimaginable today for a global bank to operate without such systems in place. Similarly, many areas of public management, from NASA to the Centers for Disease Control, have recast their programs using risk management strategies. It is particularly striking, therefore, that such thinking has failed to penetrate the field of national security policy. Venturing into uncharted waters, Managing Strategic Surprise brings together risk management experts and practitioners from different fields with internationally-recognized national security scholars to produce the first systematic inquiry into risk and its applications in national security. The contributors examine whether advance risk assessment and management techniques can be successfully applied to address contemporary national security challenges.
Surprise has always been an element of warfare, but the return of great power competition—and the high-level threat that it poses—gives urgency to thinking about surprise now. Because the future is highly uncertain, and great powers have not fought each other for over 70 years, surprise is highly likely in a future great power conflict. This study, therefore, examines potential surprises in a great power conflict, particularly in a conflict’s initial stages when the interaction of adversaries’ technologies, prewar plans, and military doctrines first becomes manifest. It is not an attempt to project the future. Rather, it seeks to do the opposite: explore the range of possible future conflicts to see where surprises might lurk.
The current defense team confronted a game-changing "strategic shock" in its first 8 months in office. The next team would be well-advised to expect the same. Defense-relevant strategic shocks jolt convention to such an extent that they force sudden, unanticipated change in the Department of Defense's (DoD) perceptions about threat, vulnerability, and strategic response. Their unanticipated onset forces the entire defense enterprise to reorient and restructure institutions, employ capabilities in unexpected ways, and confront challenges that are fundamentally different than those routinely considered in defense calculations. The likeliest and most dangerous future shocks will be unconventional. They will not emerge from thunderbolt advances in an opponent's military capabilities. Rather, they will manifest themselves in ways far outside established defense convention. Most will be nonmilitary in origin and character, and not, by definition, defense-specific events conducive to the conventional employment of the DoD enterprise. They will rise from an analytical no man's land separating well-considered, stock and trade defense contingencies and pure defense speculation. Their origin is most likely to be in irregular, catastrophic, and hybrid threats of "purpose" (emerging from hostile design) or threats of "context" (emerging in the absence of hostile purpose or design). Of the two, the latter is both the least understood and the most dangerous. -- P. [vii].
A contemporary primer on the leading arguments about U.S. national security, National Security Dilemmas addresses the major challenges and opportunities that are live-issue areas for American policymakers and strategists today. Colin S. Gray provides an in-depth analysis of a policy and strategy for deterrence; the long-term U.S. bid to transform its armed forces' capabilities, with particular reference to strategic surprise, in the face of many great uncertainties; the difficulty of understanding and exploiting the challenge of revolutionary change in warfare; the problems posed by enemies who fight using irregular methods; and the awesome dilemmas for U.S. policy over the options to wage preventive and preemptive warfare. With forty years' experience as a strategist, within and outside of government, Gray uses a problem-solving motif throughout the book, suggesting solutions to the challenges he identifies. The book's master narrative is that the United States must take a more considered strategic approach to its security dilemmas. Too often, the country's leaders decide on a policy and then move to take action, all the while neglecting to devise a plan that would connect its political purposes to military means. While many of Gray's judgments here are critical of current ideas and behavior, he crafted them as helpful guides should planners adopt them when revising policies and approaches. Strategy is a practical matter; truly it is the zone wherein theory meets practice. This text can be used as an expert guide to the major national security challenges of today. It both explains the structure of these challenges and provides useful answers. With a foreword by Lt. Gen. Paul K. Van Riper, USMC (Ret.), Bren Chair, Marine Corps University, Quantico, Virginia.
Constructing Cassandra analyzes the intelligence failures at the CIA that resulted in four key strategic surprises experienced by the US: the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the Iranian revolution of 1978, the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks—surprises still play out today in U.S. policy. Although there has been no shortage of studies exploring how intelligence failures can happen, none of them have been able to provide a unified understanding of the phenomenon. To correct that omission, this book brings culture and identity to the foreground to present a unified model of strategic surprise; one that focuses on the internal make-up the CIA, and takes seriously those Cassandras who offered warnings, but were ignored. This systematic exploration of the sources of the CIA's intelligence failures points to ways to prevent future strategic surprises.
Ephraim Kam observes surprise attack through the eyes of its victim in order to understand the causes of the victim's failure to anticipate the coming of war. Emphasing the psychological aspect of warfare, Kam traces the behavior of the victim at various functional levels and from several points of view in order to examine the difficulties and mistakes that permit a nation to be taken by surprise. He argues that anticipation and prediction of a coming war are more complicated than any other issue of strategic estimation, involving such interdependent factors as analytical contradictions, judgemental biases, organizational obstacles, and political as well as military constraints. Surprise Attack: The Victim's Perspective offers implications based on the intelligence perspective, providing both historical background and scientific analysis that draws from the author's vast experience. The book is of utmost value to all those engaged in intelligence work, and to those whose operational or political responsibility brings them in touch with intelligence assessments and the need to authenticate and then adopt them or discount them. Similarly, the book will interest any reader intrigued by decision-making processes that influence individuals and nations at war, and sometimes even shape national destiny. --Ehud Barak, Former Prime Minister of Israel
Strategic surprise is one of the most feared dilemmas that a country can suffer. United States Army doctrine, FM 100-5, Operations, says that strategic surprise is extremely difficult to achieve. Empirical historical evidence does not support this position. In fact, strategic surprise is frightfully easy to accomplish. U.S. Army doctrine should be change reflect this not so uncommon phenomenon. The revised doctrine should address both the positive and negative aspects of surprise. It should also provide for the planning considerations for exploitation of the surprised to maximize/capitalize upon the effects and benefits that accrue to the surpriser.