Saturday 23 February 2019

The Gerasimov Doctrine | What is it all about?

Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces - First Deputy Minister of Defense, General of the Army Valery Gerasimov
Lieutenant-Colonel A.J.C. Selhorst, Royal Netherlands Army, in his article describes it as follows: "In recent years Russia has conducted operations in several former Soviet states to establish a sphere of influence in those countries, prevent NATO and the EU from expanding and protect Russian interests and ethnic Russian minorities abroad. Moscow uses the Russian Federation Armed Forces (RFAF), which have developed a way of war that goes way beyond the use of military hardware alone. The Chief of the General Staff of the RFAF, General Valery Gerasimov, was the first to describe a framework for the new operational concept to achieve the objectives of Moscow’s near-abroad policy." Another monograph, The Gerasimov “Doctrine” The day the West started to fight its own shadow, by Colonel Soenke Marahrens,  provides us with an in depth analysis of General Gerasimov’s article “The value of science in prediction” from 2013. And, last but not least, the thoughts of Major Andrew J. Duncan, Canadian Armed Forces on the same subject.

Sunday 17 February 2019

The Russian Way of War

Russian tank forces, attack helicopters move towards Afghanistan through Tajikistan.
Force Structure, Tactics, and Modernisation of the Russian Ground Forces, by Dr. Lester W. Grau & Charles K. Bartles. Primer : "Russia has recently carried out substantial reforms to its military forces, increasing capability in several key areas. Russia's military has improved to the extent that it is now a reliable instrument of national power that can be used in a limited context to achieve vital national interests. Russian strategists, concerned about the capability of an advanced military adversary to carry out a large-scale conventional aerospace campaign against the Russian heartland, focus on preserving Russian influence in buffer states along its borders and on reinforcing a series of defensive bulwarks." Boston, Scott and Dara Massicot, The Russian Way of Warfare: A Primer. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2017. 

Monday 11 February 2019

A long way to go | The Russian Military Reform 3/3

The third port of an analysis about the military reform of the armed forces of the Russian Federation, by Patrick Truffer. "The purpose of this article is to investigate the factors driving Russian military reform, how their capabilities have changed in the last 10 years, and how to change them by 2030, based on the latest government armaments program." An English version will follow soon and is going to be published here.

Saturday 2 February 2019

The Loyalist Regiments of the American Revolutionary War 1775-1783

The King's Royal Regiment of New York, also known as Royal Greens, were one of the first Loyalist regiments, raised on June 19, 1776, in British Canada
This dissertation, by Stuart Salmon, "... is about the Loyalist Regiments of the American Revolution, 1775-1783. These were the formal regiments formed by the British, consisting of Americans who stayed Loyal to the British crown during the American Revolutionary War. They fought in most of the main campaigns of this war and in 1783 left with the British Army for Canada, where many of them settled. The Loyalist regiments have been neglected by academic historians with only one major work on them as a group. The intention of this dissertation is to give them their proper place in the historiography of the American Revolutionary War and of eighteenth century military history."