About this episode
Thomas Mahnken, President and CEO of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and contributor to War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy, and the Return of a Fractured World , joins the show to talk about how strategic fallacies have played a role in Ukraine. ▪️ Times • 01:33 Introduction • 02:30 Fallacies of rationality • 05:36 Is war irrational? • 10:02 Germany willed WWI to happen • 15:40 Fallacy of the irrational/hyper-rational adversary • 22:53 Rational/irrational Hitler • 28:09 Wrapped around the rational axle • 30:34 Fallacy of over/underestimating the adversary • 37:53 Losing the contingency • 41:08 Fallacies of interaction • 45:56 Learning but not doing • 50:53 Building defenses against fallacies Follow along on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack