This article assesses the role and understanding of war's most inflexible factor—time—and its associated pressures and advantages in the Russo-Ukrainian War. While there seems to be no consensus on who might prevail (and of course the elements of what constitutes victory itself can vary), the passage of time—frequently understood in military terms as endurance and exhaustion—is a useful framework to assess the direction of the war, relative advantage at various stages, who may ultimately prevail, and under what conditions that may be possible. Although timetables and schedules have played an enormous role in military history, there appears to be no systematic assessment of the role of time in relation to strategy and victory in the Russo-Ukrainian war. This article sets out the fill that gap through a systematic comparison of time's passing and time pressures facing the combatants.
What will the long-term impact of President Vladimir Putin's decision to invade Ukraine be upon the Russian state? This article assesses the likely outcomes of the Kremlin's war of aggression in Ukraine across a spectrum of economic, military, political, and social factors to evidence the scale of Russian miscalculation regarding its disastrous decision to invade Ukraine, and argues for the inevitability of Russian strategic decline as a direct consequence of its reckless military adventurism.
This volume conceptualizes the threats, challenges, opportunities, and boundaries of great power cyber competition of the 21st century. This book focuses on a key dimension of contemporary great power competition that is often less understood due to its intangible character: the competition taking place in the cyber domain, including information and cyber operations. Democracies across the globe find themselves in an unrelenting competition with peer and near-peer competitors, with a prevailing notion that no state is "safe" from the informational contest. Adversarial powers, particularly China and Russia, recognize that most competition is principally non-kinetic but dominates the information environment and cyberspace, and the volume articulates the Russian and Chinese strategies to elevate cyber and information competition to a central position. Western governments and, in particular, the U.S. government have long conceived of a war-peace duality, but that perspective is giving way to a more nuanced perception of competition. This volume goes beyond analyzing the problems prevalent in the information space and offers a roadmap for Western powers to compete in and protect the global information environment from malicious actors. Its genesis is rooted in the proposition that it is time for the West to push back against aggression and that it needs a relevant framework and tools to do so. The book demonstrates that Western democratic states currently lack both the strategic and intellectual acumen to compete and win in the information and cyber domains, and argues that the West needs a strategy to compete with near-peer powers in information and cyber warfare. This book will be of much interest to students of cyber-warfare, information warfare, defense studies, and international relations in general, as well as practitioners.
Autocratic leaders rely on intelligence machineries for regime and personal security. They often manage large, powerful, unaccountable organisations, which they hold close. But, despite their close relationship with - and reliance upon - intelligence, autocrats also frequently struggle to use it to enhance decision-making and foreign policy, and consequently suffer avoidable intelligence failures. This article argues that Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is illustrative of this broader, though understudied, pattern of autocratic mismanagement of strategic intelligence. The invasion was both spurred and accompanied by a catastrophic intelligence failure, the responsibility for which rests with Vladimir Putin, the arbiter of a system with limited capacity to offer dispassionate strategic assessments. His failure is characteristic of autocratic regimes assessing foreign developments, including Putin's Soviet predecessors. This article contributes to the emerging scholarship on intelligence in autocratic regimes by examining Putin's use of intelligence in the Ukraine War in the context of the broader literature on intelligence and decision.