You may have noticed that we have been working here at SOFREP on expanding the amount of content that falls under current events and open-source analysis. This is going to continue to expand.
Most of us have become convinced that the present models of war and politics have become increasingly divorced from reality. A good primer on some of the future (or near-future) of war can be found in John Robb’s excellent book, Brave New War. Yet it can be argued that even Robb doesn’t get it all correct, as he forecasts the decline of the nation-state; some of the nation states in the world have adapted well to the new, irregular, open-source paradigm of war, most notably Russia and China. There are still major strategic actors working in the new environment.
The fact remains that, even as the US spends increasingly large amounts of money on high-tech weapons systems for open warfare, the dominant form of warfare has become a web of open-source guerrilla warfare, proxy war, cyber and economic warfare, and influence/information war. Russia and China have become increasingly adept at elements of these forms of warfare, while the US and its allies are behind the curve. Part of this is a lack of understanding of what is really going on.
While the open-source methods we are limited to have their limitations, with enough study we believe we can paint a reasonably accurate picture of what is going on, in emergent conflicts as well as in an overall strategic sense.
There’s still a lot of work to do, but it’s coming.
Welcome to the next stage of SOFREP.
You may have noticed that we have been working here at SOFREP on expanding the amount of content that falls under current events and open-source analysis. This is going to continue to expand.
Most of us have become convinced that the present models of war and politics have become increasingly divorced from reality. A good primer on some of the future (or near-future) of war can be found in John Robb’s excellent book, Brave New War. Yet it can be argued that even Robb doesn’t get it all correct, as he forecasts the decline of the nation-state; some of the nation states in the world have adapted well to the new, irregular, open-source paradigm of war, most notably Russia and China. There are still major strategic actors working in the new environment.
The fact remains that, even as the US spends increasingly large amounts of money on high-tech weapons systems for open warfare, the dominant form of warfare has become a web of open-source guerrilla warfare, proxy war, cyber and economic warfare, and influence/information war. Russia and China have become increasingly adept at elements of these forms of warfare, while the US and its allies are behind the curve. Part of this is a lack of understanding of what is really going on.
While the open-source methods we are limited to have their limitations, with enough study we believe we can paint a reasonably accurate picture of what is going on, in emergent conflicts as well as in an overall strategic sense.
There’s still a lot of work to do, but it’s coming.
Welcome to the next stage of SOFREP.
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