Strategy&Future

Jacek Bartosiak talks to Gen. (ret.) Ben Hodges on war in Ukraine as of 26 April 2022.

Jacek Bartosiak and Albert Świdziński talk to Jacob Shapiro on the unfolding global geopolitical turmoil and disruptions of supply chains.

Jacek Bartosiak and Albert Świdziński talk to Louis Vincent Gave on the coming destabilization of the world system and the financial implications of the great power rivalry that has begun.

A few remarks on the political strategy of the Polish state in the new European circumstances (theses for discussion)

“Russia doesn’t need Ukraine as an independent country. They need our resources. Now the scenario is repeated. Russian dictator Putin planned to take away Ukraine’s minerals in order to enrich themselves and gain influence around the world.” National Association of Mining Industry of Ukraine

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has predictably fixed a substantial proportion of the Russian Armed Forces. Russian forces are not fighting as battalion tactical groups (BTGs), but this remains the manner in which both the Russians [1] and the Ukrainians [2] are administratively assigning troop movements. As such, this overview will use this denominator as well, though again the evidence from the war suggests that the primary unit of tactical engagement will not be the BTG per se.

On the night of February 23rd to 24th, 2022, everything seemed to be going as Putin had planned. At the same time, the course of events was the nightmare of Halford Mackinder’s worst dreams. Mackinder was the Nestor of world geopolitics, a faithful son of the sea of Albion (then a sea hegemon) and (more than 100 years ago) the creator of the most famous geopolitical maxim: “Whoever rules East Europe commands the Heartland; whoever rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; whoever rules the World-Island commands the World.” To speak in the language of the 21st century, whoever controls Eurasia has the greatest agency over the rules on which the world operates and sets the rules for key strategic flows between its regions and exchanges between states.

Jacek Bartosiak and Nicholas Myers discuss the operational and tactical details of the war in Ukraine, as of afternoon 25 Feb 2022.

Autonomous systems are a dangerous element of future warfare. Especially taking into account the prospect of so-called Lethal Autonomous Weapons (LAWs), controlled by machine learning and AI. And as Michael Horowitz writes, it would be a mistake to focus solely on the drone strike trees and miss the vast military robotics forest.[1] He raises quite an important question for understanding the upcoming military future. [1] Michael C. Horowitz, “The Ethics & Morality of Robotic Warfare: Assessing the Debate over Autonomous Weapons”, Daedalus 2016; 145 (4) // https://www.amacad.org/publication/ethics-morality-robotic-warfare-assessing-debate-over-autonomous-weapons

The main take-away points from the events in Belarus from the summer of 2020 (the unrest of the pro-Western factions of Belarusian civil society) until the current refugee crisis on the Belarusian border with the EU are the following:

The current crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border suggests that Eastern Europe won’t see peace and stability in this decade. The Ukrainian crisis together with the Belarussian crisis gives enough evidence that processes are occurring within the region that can affect the entire European continent, much more than was the case in 2014. A global dimension to the crisis was given by the threat of Poland to cut off its rail links to Belarus and the symmetrical threat of Belarus to cut off gas supplies to Europe through Belarussian territory.

“It may take longer than the visionaries think, but the pilot in the cockpit is already an endangered species.” The Economist, 2011[1] [1] Unmanned Aerial Drones: Flight of the Drones: Why the Future of Air Power Belongs to Unmanned Systems,// Economist, Oct. 8, 2011, available at http://www.economist.com/ node/21531433.