Franz-Stefan Gady

25, May #WarSpillover

Franz-Stefan Gady: The Russian airstrikes of recent days…

The Russian airstrikes of recent days make clear what countries in strategic depth—the NATO hubs such as Germany, Czechia, Slovenia (or Austria)—would be confronted with in a general NATO-Russia war: a missile and drone war over vast distances with considerable destructive potential.

https://x.com/HoansSolo/status/2058785126146838991?s=20

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Franz-Stefan Gady

03, May #WarSpillover

Franz-Stefan Gady: Quick note on the supposed capability…

Quick note on the supposed capability gap from the Trump administration halting the planned MDTF long-range fires battalion deployment to Germany: the US Navy and Air Force can partially substitute: carrier strike groups with Tomahawk-armed destroyers and subs, B-52s and B-2s carrying JASSM-ER/LRASM, and forward-deployed F-35s. PrSM on HIMARS/M270 is already fielded across regular Army field artillery brigades and can fill part of the ground-based fires role. The harder gap, next to mid-range capability, is the MDTF sensor-to-shooter fusion. The MDTF is also a key element in how the US Army envisions implementing multi-domain ops. I wrote about this and the potential escalatory risks in my book „Die Rückkehr des Krieges”.

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Franz-Stefan Gady

01, May #WarSpillover

Franz-Stefan Gady: One issue I see here is that the perception…

One issue I see here is that the perception of a transparent battlespace (IMO semi-transparent at best) paired with the notion of accelerated kill-chains is a further widening of the technical and tactical levels of warfare from the operational and strategic-political levels of warfare, which creates essentially two wars, and makes successful war termination harder. The combination creates a war-termination problem by structurally widening the gap between the technical-tactical levels of war and the operational and strategic-political levels. Precision warfare encourages planners to substitute the act of striking for a theory of how striking produces not only political but also operational-level outcomes. Transparent battlespace assumptions make this substitution feel somewhat doctrinally respectable, because if you can see everything and kill what you see, any problem appears to dissolve into a targeting problem. This could turn into a dead-end. Beyond the strike as strategy paradox Amos Fox & I outlined before, I think that adversaries will increasingly price into their military and political decision-making overwhelming inferiority in closing of kill-chains and defeat at the tactical level and adapt their force design, structure and doctrines accordingly to “ride out” this form of precision warfare and still prevail or at least not suffer defeats at the other levels of warfare.

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Franz-Stefan Gady

29, April #WarSpillover

Franz-Stefan Gady: Beyond operational stagnation…

'Beyond operational stagnation, atomization has removed the military’s internal safety valves and heightened the risk of an unintended kinetic clash. The purge systematically replaced an entrenched old guard, who protected the status quo to preserve their patronage networks, with an echelon of terrified successors. This dynamic grants Xi greater latitude to order troops into combat. While these new commanders possess stronger technical credentials, they lack the political capital to act as a strategic braking mechanism. Stripped of the weight to stall or manage crises privately, this atomized officer corps no longer buffers political pressure or transmits honest assessments. Xi is left to make decisions in an information environment divorced from reality.'

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Franz-Stefan Gady

16, April

Franz-Stefan Gady: Moscow is producing about 60 Iskander…

‚Moscow is producing about 60 Iskander missiles a month and has expanded its launcher capacity, while Ukraine lacks sufficient advanced air-defence systems such as the US-made Patriot system to cover the entire country, Skibitskyi said.‘

Franz-Stefan Gady

15, April

Franz-Stefan Gady: Iran secretly acquired a Chinese spy…

‚Iran secretly acquired a Chinese spy satellite that gave the Islamic republic a powerful new capability to target US military bases across the Middle East during the recent war, according to a Financial Times investigation. Leaked Iranian military documents show the satellite, known as TEE-01B, was acquired by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Aerospace Force in late 2024 after it was launched into space from China.‘