In this episode Dr. Jack Watling, Research Fellow for Land Warfare at the Royal United Services Institute, discusses the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan that has erupted since late September surrounding the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. He examines what we can learn from it about ground combat on the modern battlefield. Among other things, he discusses the saturation of the battlefield with a variety of sensors, challenges associated with electronic warfare, and the importance of camouflage. Collectively, these represent a problem set that the US military and those of its allies largely have not encountered during nearly two decades of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan—which makes the lessons he discusses especially important.
This episode of the MWI Podcast tackles the topic of no-fly zones. Almost immediately after Russian forces invaded Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy began calling for a no-fly zone to be implemented over his country to negate the effects of Russian airpower. It’s a call that NATO leaders have resisted. To discuss why, and to offer a very unique perspective on what putting a no-fly zone in place actually entails, John Amble is joined by retired US Air Force Colonel Mike Pietrucha, a veteran aviator with extensive combat experience—including taking part in the enforcement of no-fly zones over both northern and southern Iraq and in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. ...
The war in Ukraine has been playing out in—and across—all domains. So it is perhaps surprising that Russia's invasion plan held almost no role for the type of operation designed to bridge two of those domains. There has been little sign that Russia sought to employ amphibious operations to gain a foothold in the south of the country—despite Ukraine's long Black Sea coast. Is this an indicator that such operations are a relic of the past? Or is it an anomaly? To help understand those questions, we're returning to an episode originally released early last year that featured a conversation with Tim Heck, MWI's deputy editorial director and coeditor of the book On Contested Shores: The Evolving Role of Amphibious Operations in the History of Warfare. ...
In this episode, we talk to retired Army Col. Peter Newell about Hacking 4 Defense, a program that leverages the unique qualities of universities and private-sector startups to find solutions for government—especially the defense enterprise. ...