Battlefield Assessments
A Leader’s Guide to Conducting Staff Rides
Dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, armies have been using the “modern” staff ride, developed by the chief of staff of the Prussian Army, Helmuth von Moltke, to educate their officers. The...
Dangerous Myths, Ukraine, and the Future of Great Power Competition
Editor's note: This article introduces a full report based on a contemporary battlefield assessment conducted by the Modern War Institute. The authors of the report have led several such...
Lessons for America’s Longest-Running War from the Americas’ Longest-Running Insurgency
In 2016, Colombia achieved a remarkable success by seemingly bringing to an end the Western Hemisphere’s longest-running insurgency. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has been at war...
Analyzing the Russian Way of War: Evidence from the 2008 Conflict with Georgia
Editor’s note: This report is an MWI Contemporary Battlefield Assessment, a collaborative effort by United States Military Academy cadets and MWI faculty based on field research conducted on the...
The Taming of the Tigers: An MWI Contemporary Battlefield Assessment of the Counterinsurgency in Sri Lanka
Editor's note: This report is an MWI Contemporary Battlefield Assessment, a collaborative effort by United States Military Academy cadets and MWI faculty based on field research conducted in Sri...
Modern War Institute Cadets and Faculty Tour Sri Lanka Battlefield
The Modern War Institute takes a team of faculty and cadets to Sri Lanka to study the final operations of its decades-long civil war.
MWI Battlefield Assessment on the Siege of Sarajevo
In this new report, MAJ Michael Jackson finds that the positional warfare of the siege of Sarajevo in the mid-1990s resembled the trench warfare aspects of World War I far more than the dynamic urban warfare American forces faced in Baghdad in 2003.