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Peter Roberts

This Means War

A new book edited by Amos Fox and Franz Stefan Gady picks apart the concept of Multi Domain Operations in forensic detail. A collection of world class scholars and practitioners demystify the idea of MDO and airs just some of the key problems that lie within the 'Big Hand, Small Map' approach to military operations. From a lack of a theory of success, a failure to address tactical concerns, an agnostic view of adversaries, and some deep philosophical flaws, one wonders why Western leaders continue to be so besotted with MDO as a way of fighting. According to Amos and Franz: it just wont work.

MDO: It's a terrible concept

Have Europeans become desensitized to Moscow's actions? 2025 saw Moscow fly armed drones into Poland; aerial incursions in Estonia, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Germany, and The Netherlands; seaborne and subsurface reconnaissance and attacks on the seabeds of the Atlantic Ocean, North, Baltic, and Norwegian seas; numerous incidents of water poisoning in Germany; parcel bombs being sent through the courier system; propaganda, cyber, information attacks and disinformation campaigns across European outlets; armed military personnel crossing Europe's borders; power outages across European countries; and political interference in most elections. President Putin has been orchestrating campaigns of sabotage, subversion, and attacks on most European states for 12 months (and hence attacks against the global economy), as well as continuing his long conventional military campaign that seeks the end of Ukraine as a country. According to Keir Giles we can expect more of the same in 2026.

What has Moscow got in store for 2026?

How do defence companies fund growth when the orders from politicians have been promised but the cash isn't forthcoming? Want to build a new factory to double Europe's 155mm ammo production, or tank fleet, or - heavens forbid - drones? Great - but where does the money come from for the infrastructure? Why don't existing MFIs across Europe fill that space? And what might a dedicated defence, security, and resilience offer governments as well as industry? Former Brigadier General Robbie Boyd, now on the Senior Leadership team for the development of the new DSR Bank, explains all. This episode allows those in the national security community who don't have a deep understanding of the financial sector to understand the potential offered by a dedicated banking organisation for defence. Building off the ideas of a NATO bank, and linked directly to the rebuilding of NATO's failed deterrence posture, the DSR bank feels a bit like a game-changer.

Show me the money! The DSR Bank

A long held military truism is about commanding the high ground in any fight: often regarded as a precursor to victory. In the days of digital evangelism, much is made of this tenet in a metaphorical sense: there are claims that controlling the digital high ground will guarantee success. But warfare continues to require operating and fighting in physical terrain. In recent conflicts, few forces have been able to avoid fighting in mountains: the prevailing forces usually exploit mountains as the literal high ground. In the Kargil War, Nagorno-Karabakh, Kashmir, Afghanistan, and in Ukraine, as well as in resistance operations by the Kurds, mountain warfare has been a significant feature in fighting.
 
Mountain warfare involves mobility (skiing, snowshoeing, dogs, mules, sledges, et al), mountaineering (ascending, roped or free climbing, traverses, rappelling, etc), cold weather survival (including avalanche preparation), and operating at height. It is also warfare: the requirements are not simply surviving and operating in cold weather or high environments but to contest, challenge, and fight in these conditions. Warfare in such environments cannot simply be bases and patrols, they do (and will continue to) entail combat operations.
 
The history of human conflict does indeed demonstrate the advantages in controlling the high ground. The literal high ground. The realities of mountain and cold weather warfare – and the C2 element of that – cannot be escaped. Which is why so many states retain trained, equipped, and specialist formations to perform this task. They are not simply specialist light infantry: they offer skills that enable success in the extreme terrains.
 
Lance Blythe talks about his new(ish) book, Ski, Climb, Fight: The 10th Mountain Division and the Rise of Mountain Warfare.

Mountain Warfare

The disorderly arrival of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the battlefield foretells of what is to come. The similarities to the hype around cyber warfare in the 2010s is all too clear. Yet the promise of profound change to warfare because of AI (and autonomy) is to be found everywhere. What is the reality? What will battlefields feel like? When will AI (in all its forms) arrive)? How do we know it will work as promised? What guarantees are there? Who checks the delivery? How can we derisk some of the (existential) threats that AI poses? Who is leading, and who is in charge? Rob Wilson, defence tech guru, addresses just some of these issues. We end up cracking open a can of worms, or perhaps Pandora's box.

Battlefield AI

That the military is subordinate to political (civil) authority seems like a no brainer. Headlines are made when challenges to this norm occur (see Trump 47 as an example), but those challenges have been more frequent and more dangerous in American history. Indeed, General Washington's principles of military subordination have had a myriad of challengers over the last 250 years: but the institutions have come through and self-corrected where necessary. In talking about her new book "The State and The Soldier", Kori Schake provides a quite excellent riposte to Samual Huntington's essay "The Soldier and The State". Her analysis of US civil-military relations since the Founding Fathers is a compelling read, and one that should be required reading (especially for those prone to over-excitement and clickbait headlines).

The State and The Soldier

In military circles, training can mean all things to different groups. Some think it is for making friends and building partnerships. Other parts of the national security community think it is for validation of value-for-money; other parts consider it an assurance exercise. Even within the military, training gets a bum rap: being seen as either a waste of time, or a rare moment to escape barracks or dockyard hassle (or HQ long screwdrivers) and get away from it all. There is also a significant proportion of HQ staff – especially those in strategic level HQs – who think it is a waste of cash: something European militaries have been short of for decades. Perhaps this is the reason that training budgets often get hit to pay for shiny new kit that promises much but has less utility than might be expected.
 
Yet for adversaries, the amount a military train sums up its credibility. Smart intelligence officials can make correlations between the amount of time that units regularly spend training with the credibility, lethality and readiness of their forces. If an adversary trains more, you need to at least match that in order to prevail in a conflict: any conflict.
 
When building training events for contemporary militaries, leaders now need to tackle both the problem of smaller forces – doing by the same commitments as their predecessors – and a wider array of skills across the combat echelon. All this makes time for training the most precious resource a military force has.
 
In recovering from campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the British Army recognised that something was not right with it's training: it simply wasn't getting what it needed from Cold war scripts and training design. So it started from scratch. Major General Chris Barry is the man who changed it: and who is leading delivery of the new Land Training System. I went down to his HQ at Warminster for a chat.

Training is credibility

The was much to like about the 2025 UK SDR: an uncomfortable but honest diagnosis of the state of Britain's military; a characterisation of the world order and future threats; and a vigour to addressing the challenges. Professor Paul Cornish from the University Of Exeter's Centre for the Public Understanding of Defence and Security picks apart the issues in the document, as well as what was not in it. If 'Who was it for?' is perhaps the most revealing question and answer, then 'So what will Allies and adversaries make of it?' is the most worrying aspect.
 
For those who think Paul and the team at CPUDS couldn't do better, the link below takes you to a series of essays that articulates a different take on the challenges and responses written over a couple of weeks during the Winter of 2024/2025. Writing a defence review is tough but not impossible.
 
 https://paulcornish.substack.com/p/uk-strategic-defence?utm_campaign=reaction&utm_medium=email&utm_source=substack&utm_content=post

Debriefing the latest UK Strategic Defence Review

Given the way Russian military cheifs send their troops into combat without regard for rates of attrition and casualties, it seems to bamboozle many Western commentators that the Russian people are not rising up against their leaders. Why? Amelie Tolvin, a visiting scholar at the University of Helsinki's Aleksanteri Institute, provides some clear insight about why revolution is unlikely, but also why Russian troops fight in the way they do (war crimes and all).
 
Over the past 3 years – since the start of Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine - various military leaders, diplomats, military chiefs and commentators have been at pains to tell us all that the Russian military is on the verge of collapsing. They have quoted figures of dead and injured from that conflict that seem almost impossible for a Western audience to accept. Indeed, the loss rate of people on the Russian front has been so high that people suggest there are no more men in Russian to recruit or conscript. Amelie provides some important corrective evidence that needs to be better understood.
 
You can read Amelie's article in Foreign Policy Magazine here: https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/04/09/russia-soldiers-ukraine-war-crimes-meatgrinder-human-waves-brutal-violence-protest/

The Russian Meat Grinder

After more than 3 years of war in Ukraine, the Russian military is not a spent force: indeed, the combination of more flying hours for more aircrew, 3 years of combat experience in CAS, AI, CAP, Strike and ISR missions, a war economy supporting new airframes and weapons, and low pilot attrition rates has made the Russian Air Force capable of what it was supposed to do in 2022 – and then some. It now has the ability to outmatch European NATO states in capability, experience and fighting power for the next decade. Professor Justin Bronk, Senior Research Fellow for Air Power at RUSI in London, explains why a wholesale shift to drones isn't going to be the ubiquitous answer that the speeches from military and political leaders make out. As the IAMD system in NATO states matures (albeit at differing speeds), the Russian system is also a major factor in air power planning for the future. The impact on how NATO wants to fight, and how it will have to fight, is stark. And it's not going to be good enough to continue copying the US model: for the USAF and USN, the Pacific is requiring a drive towards a different force design, way of operating, C2, and basing options from those that would work for NATO in Europe. Context matters.

MDO: It's a terrible concept

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