Ft. Leavenworth Series

The British demands in mid-1814 were fierce and would have reduced the United States in size and limited its potential for expansion. The United States had declared war on Great Britain in 1812 because the British were seizing American merchant ships and cargoes, taking crewmen into the Royal Navy involuntarily, and providing arms to Native […]

In the spring of 1944, the conflict in the China-Burma-India Theater (CBI) began to turn in favor of the Allies. The Japanese, in two offensives: ICHIGO (Operation Number 1) in China; and, U-GO (Operation C) in India, endeavored to take China out of the war and drive the British from India. General William Slim’s 14th […]

The Battle of Ramadi in 2006-07 is one of the lesser-known but arguably one of the fiercest and the most decisive battle of the Iraq War. This battle marked a change in the US understanding of the war in Iraq and the adoption of highly controversial and effective tactics that reflected that changed understanding. The […]

John of Salisbury (died 1180) was a prolific and erudite English writer. Dubbed “the best classical scholar of his age,” he was clerk to St. Thomas Becket of Canterbury and, later, became the bishop of Chartres. Among his numerous works is the book Policraticus, which, despite its fame as a political and moral treatise, has […]

Al-Qaeda and ISIS used the Management of Savagery as both an operational concept and doctrine. Written for al-Qaeda in 2004, but demonstrated most thoroughly by ISIS from 2014 to 2021, the online published work explains how Islamist ideological groups hoped to defeat the West, in general, and the United States, in specific. This presentation explains […]

Brash. Brilliant. Pompous. Ground-breaking. The list goes on but fails to capture the drive, the talent, the intellectual horsepower, or the creativity of Colonel (R) John Boyd, USAF. There are many scholars and Boyd fans who contend that Boyd is the greatest military theorist that you have never heard of, but should have. Throughout his […]

During the first half of the nineteenth century, no military thinker arguably had more impact on the United States Army than Denis Hart Mahan. By the time he graduated at the top of his class at West Point in 1824, Mahan had become a protégé of Superintendent Sylvanus Thayer, whose wide-ranging reforms would win him […]

After the Vietnam War, the US Army refocused itself on its primary peacetime mission since the end of the Second World War: the defense of NATO. However, the Army leadership had to face the reality that the US Army was not capable of accomplishing this mission. In 1973, the US Army did not have the […]

The Six Secret Teachings of Jiang Ziya (Ta’i Kung) is the oldest of China’s Seven Military Classics. This foundational work from the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 BCE) period purports to have originated more than five centuries before Sun Tzu (544-496 BCE). The six teachings are a record of conversations between Jiang and the future Zhou Kings […]

After WWII, many historians, as well as military theorists and leaders, focused on the German ability to restore mobility to warfare, especially at the operational level, in the early years of the war. Popularized as “Blitzkrieg,” the Germans were often portrayed as the pioneers of this new form of warfare—far ahead of all other nations […]

In the late 1940s the U.S. Air Force embraced the use of space as a natural extension of its traditional air power mission. As such, they envisioned air and space mediums converging into a single operational domain. Dr. Kalic will lecture on the U.S. Air Force’s development of the Aerospace concept in the period 1946-1963. […]