School of War - Ep 256: Nadia Schadlow on Strategic Depth

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

Nadia Schadlow, former Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy and senior fellow at Hudson Institute, joins the show to breakdown what strategic depth is and why the concept remains relevant. ▪️ Times 02:37 Unhinged, Frenetic Times 03:36 What is Strategic Depth? 07:50 A Lack of Space 12:50 Territory and War 14:55 How to Increase Time 23:18 Allies and Forward Defense 30:29 How Do You Get Freedom of Choice? 36:57 Keeping and Maintaining Strategic Depth Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more content on our School of War Substack

Everyone knows that we live in a world that, in strategic terms, is shrinking. We have intercontinental ballistic missiles, effectively instantaneous cyber attacks, and any number of other technological phenomena that indicate that the vast territorial spaces that once constituted strategic depth now seem to matter less. So what was the original idea of strategic depth? And what does losing it mean for military planning and decision-making today? And is it really gone? Let's get into it.

It is for a war. The Rocky invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in history. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the grave situation in France. We'll fight on the beaches. Which will fight on the landing ground. We shall fight in the fields and in those streets.

Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Nadia Shadlow. Nadia is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. She was the Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy and the First Trump administration. She's also one of my favorite colleagues, a generally smart person that I learned something from every time I talk to you. Nadia, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you so much, Aaron, for having me on. And I confess that I do listen, even before you said that, I'm a fan of School of Wars. And it's one of the one of the time. of my podcasts that I listen to when I drive. So I only have about five. And I'm so, so you're on there. That's a high honor. That's a high honor. I want to talk about this project you've been working on today on this concept of strategic depth, which is, I think, something that's important to think through for reasons that we'll get into, especially amidst the context of a world that feels increasingly unhinged. I don't know if you share that general assumption or if you're more sanguine about everything. I kind of feel like when I wake

up in the morning. Remember those old movies, the sort of pre-9-11, geopolitical thrillers that would open, movies like Crimson Tide, and they open with the newsreel, like Russian rebels have seized control of Russia's nuclear arsenal, you know, and they sort of set up the crisis, and then the movie takes place within the crisis. I feel like every day when I wake up in the morning and I read the news, it's like the newsreel to the start of one of those movies, and that's just what it's like to be alive in 2025. Am I overreacting? No, I think, no, unfortunately, I think you're right. I think would be interesting to do some of those newsreels today to actually do that, see what we come up with after a month of doing something similar. But no, things do seem unhinged. They're certainly

really fast-moving, but sort of a frenetic, you know, a frenetic pace at a time when we're trying to also just rethink what the world looks like today, the direction that it's going in. So we see this architecture sort of in some ways collapsing around us for better or worse, and sometimes it's for better. Sometimes things should be collapsed, but we don't yet have the new one and we have all these events happening. So I think people are just trying to sort things out in their minds, at least I am. So you mentioned the way in which things seem to be moving fast. This gets us to your subject of study, strategic depth. What is strategic depth? Why should we care about it in 2025? Well, it's traditionally, it's a kind of purely military, more of a military concept. And it's one that, you know,

Army and Marines are pretty familiar with because it involves territory. And it's the idea that if you can, you don't want to be drawn into an enemy's territory and get stuck there, essentially. But at the same time, that's what the enemy wants to do, right? They want to draw you in and prevent you from moving, from maneuvering, from achieving your objective. And the most famous examples of this historically, I mean, there are several, but two of the most famous, both involve, both are in Europe and involve Russia. So Napoleon's invasion of Russia, I had gotten the idea for the piece

after coming across this famous graph called the Menard graph. It's out there, it's considered to be one of the most beautiful and sort of perfect depictions of a lot of data in one place, and it's very elegant. And you see a kind of a thick line that depicts Napoleon's troops, I think 400-something thousand,

moving into Russian in 1812, and then a very thin line, leaving of about 10,000 troops. And I realized that, wow, implicit here is this is an illustration of strategic death. Russia had it, drew in Napoleon's forces, obviously hundreds of thousands of them died, and very few left. And then the other example was the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. And I began to think, well, this is sort of, this is about territory, and it has been traditionally. And what does it mean today? And about the same time, too, I'd been reading, about China and Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon and especially Volt Typhoon, which the FBI was saying

that this is, you know, China's everywhere in American critical infrastructure, water, transportation, electricity, grid. And I thought, wow, China really has strategic depth in this country. And that's kind of how the two, both the history and a contemporary event came together. And I began to think about what would it mean to update the concept of strategic depth? to other domains. Is it worth doing that? And so that's something I'd like to talk to you about, because you're really smart and you've actually been in the military, operated in environments where this may or may not have been important. And I'd love to hear what you think, too. Well, we think along parallel lines, because I've spent the last, I don't know, a couple of years or

so thinking that the classical geopolitical theorists, people like Halford McKinder, Nicholas Speakman, people who listen to this show will know that I have more than a passing interest these guys seem to have a lot of smart things to say that we should pay attention again to in 2025. But the problem when you talk about the conclusions that these guys reached either at the turn of the 20th century or in the middle of the 20th century is that the world has changed a lot since the middle of the 20th century in particular because of the evolution of technology, the introduction of things like rockets, nuclear weapons, et cetera. And so it sort of scrambles or at least makes you have to think through afresh the prescriptions of the classical geopolitical

thinkers if you're going to try to really apply them in 2025. And so that's another way, I think, of dancing around or being on the edge of the same issue. What are these traditional concepts that used to shape decisions mean in a world where I don't know, you're somewhere on the eastern seaboard. I'm traveling down in the middle of Virginia right now. We're hundreds of miles apart, at least, where we can press buttons and do this instantaneously record this podcast without any problem posed by the space in between the two of us. Before we get to how to update the thinking for new domains and present-day technology, let's stay on the original concept for just a second. So if China and Russia are examples of countries that benefit from having real depth,

what are the problems faced by, say, in Israel or a Pakistan or maybe back in the day of West Germany? You know, what risks are you running when you lack space? Well, and I mean, I would add the U.S. too, with China and Russia, and that traditionally we've had it as well, right? Like, probably even more than them, right? Because we're an island nation. We have the seas that gave us great strategic depth. And I, so, I mean, huge problems. I mean, you see what, well, first we've seen, we've seen what's happened to Israel, right? We've seen Hamas's attacks. We've seen Israel's rightful concern ever since it's founding with this problem of strategic depth and how to maintain it. I mean, it's existential for Israel. And we're seeing it play out now, and we see the consideration of it, the need to retain it, is key to any lasting solution.

The Israelis are not going to give up that, you know, give that up anytime soon, ever, nor should they. They would be destroyed. So I think it's central to how they're thinking about what the future of that region will look like. And with Pakistan, we've seen how, you know, fundamentally, it's whole, and one of the many case studies that I'm doing will be on Pakistan on how it's shaped its whole view of the region and Afghanistan. And it's essentially infiltration of Afghanistan and the creation of these lines of communication and supply lines that had a hugely detrimental impact for the United States during the war. And it's something that we as a country, we did not have a strategy to deal with,

I think we tried to win a war in Afghanistan, fight in Afghanistan, without considering this really serious issue of Pakistan's view of its strategic depth. I believe we should have sought to undermine it from the beginning, and we didn't. And we basically ignored it for all different reasons, whether it was too difficult or a whole host of reasons. That's probably something I could interview you about. It had a huge negative impact on how things ended up there. So I think it is, you know, there's a historical component to this, too, that's interesting in terms of some of the case studies looking at how countries have been shaped by their need to have the space to maneuver, not be surprised by the enemy and not create an area where an enemy or adversary or an opponent can operate from. Yeah, I guess that inspires me to posit something that one of the common responses, slash potential common pitfalls of countries lacking strategic depth is to have a taste for preemption

and sort of forward-leaning aggressiveness, which, if done wisely and with care, could lead to positive results, but which could easily tumble over into a kind of recklessness. And I guess you could say for the countries that are, I think here of the United States, that have what appears to be a lot of space, you could argue that you might fall into the pitfall, fall of complacency. You might think threats aren't as big as they are because they seem so far away. Let me ask you this, though. I think one easy way to think about strategic depth in 2025 is to say that at least in its traditional sense, it's just gone. It's been on the way out for a long time. It's been on the way out since, I mean, you could argue that, you know, rail technology, motorization dealt pretty

severe blows to traditional conceptions of strategic depth, but with aviation, with with missiles, ballistic missiles and a whole host of other things that have shrunk the world, IT technology being very, very important in this story. It's just gone so that you have things like Ukraine's Operation Spider Web back this summer where Ukraine was able to destroy or damage a pretty decent chunk of Russia's strategic bomber fleet, not just in bases. In fact, I think if I recall correctly, mostly in bases that are very, very far from Ukraine, one up in the far northwest corner of Russia near Murmansk, and then there was one way

out east, like along the Mongolian frontier out in the direction of the Pacific. So Russia, the sort of famous case study, the example everyone reaches to, as you have reached yourself, for an example of traditional conceptions of strategic depth, it just doesn't seem to have it anymore. Now, that also strikes me that's probably a little simplistic as a conclusion to come to. But what do you think of it and what nuance, if any, would you add? So clearly, the territorial concept of strategic depth has less and less value. It doesn't mean that territory and war is not important, right? Because I think we're quick today to kind of forget, I mean, territory matters, holding territory matters. It just matters in different ways. It creates different problem sets for war planners,

for conflict itself. But it does lead one to think, you know, how do you apply to what degree is the concept of strategic depth is relevant, and I think we've talked about that in ways it's not as relevant in the way it used to be, but how might it be relevant going forward? And I think one way is to look at the cyber domain, the space domain, the industrial base domain, and think about, does this have applicability in these other domains in terms of creating concepts of operations and plans

to ensure that you have time in all of those domains to respond. So that's kind of what I'm trying to think through now. And at the same time, at which point does it become too broad of a concept to have no value at all? You seem to have your finger on what it seems to me to be the key point, which was that the space question of depth, strategic depth, was always incidental. It matters. You need territory for non-military reasons. But the space really only mattered in military terms because it gave you time, which in turn gave you freedom. Right.

Freedom in the most basic literal sense, freedom of choice, freedom of action. And so that's what Russia earned from all of this space. That's what China earned. That's what America gained from its oceans. Or should, you know, should the Brits come back like they did in the War of 1812, we would earn again from our vast spaces. But it's really the time. It's really the time that matters the most. And so I guess that's one way of thinking about how it could apply in 2025 is how do you buy that time in other ways?

Yeah. And it's a way, yeah, I love that because it's a way of, it's a way of quantifying the time. And it's a way of forcing policy people, planners, thinkers. How do you, what's the plan for increasing your time, your time to operate? And to use an example of, you know, the China critical infrastructure example, you know, if everything shuts down a 20, 24 hours, and let's say, if they have the capability to do that, clearly that doesn't give us enough time, right? So we need to be thinking about how do you inject strategic depth, how do you apply it to these domains to bias time? And it's a way of, you know, several years ago,

about two years ago, I wrote a piece called the forgotten dimension of strategy. And it was time. So it's actually, I hadn't thought of it this way until this conversation, but I think it's linked at a slightly different angle there, but I think this concept of time and how to address it in strategy and at the operational level is pretty important. I think we do it. We do it. We've done it pretty well at the tactical level in that it's clearly part of the way the military thinks, right? You have to be able to respond. Leaders need to be able to make decisions quickly, respond with agility. Klauswitz is all about make decisions quickly despite friction. That's what makes a great general. There are others, you know, the Oudaloup, John Boyd, was all time in quick decision-making.

So at the tactical level, we've kind of thought about it. How do you think about injecting depth and so buying time in a domain like cyber, which seems to me to be defined, as we were sort of alluding to earlier, by the total absence of depth. Everything, as it were in cyberspace is right next to everything else all the time, as our conversation right now sort of illustrates. In the original essay, I cite the same. Cyber Solararium Commission, which was done several years ago, was bipartisan commission. And it ended up having an impact on legislation and in some of our government agencies. But fundamentally,

one of the key ideas was layered defense. So you can't just, you have layers of defense to provide you with protection. If an adversary gets to one layer, you have another layer to depend on. So I think it's an expansion. Strategic depth is not just resiliency, though, right? I think it's different because it implies a sense of an offensive component, a proactive component. Resiliency to me is you're kind of defensive, you're sitting back, but you're able to recover, hopefully. But strategic depth, I think if you create it and want to create it in a domain, it involves a proactive set of actions going forward. And say more about resiliency. What is resiliency as opposed to depth in the way you're thinking? I mean, resiliency, I think, the way it's used for,

First of all, it's used everywhere. It's the ability to respond to recover from some sort of attack or action. So in terms of the grid, to go back to that, a resilient grid, you wouldn't have to wait weeks and weeks for transformers to be delivered. Or you wouldn't have to wait weeks for it to get back up again, let's say. Or if something happens to a water supply, you would be able to respond. And resiliency is the ability to respond, I think, and recover from adversarial or bad. or events, events, disasters or whether natural disasters or, you know, driven by humans, driven by individuals. So it's having, having things, you know, stockpile is a traditional form of resiliency, which is much less relevant today, too. But in the old days, stockpiles were

considered to be a former resiliency. So you have reserves of equipment, reserves of oil, reserves of things to help you recover from an event. This other way of dealing with the problem of what seems to be shrinking strategic depth in the modern role that you identify is this notion of defending Ford. Say more about that. This is where we seem to me to be most clearly on the terrain of traditional geopolitical theory. What does it mean to defend Ford to build depth?

Yeah. And it's also, I think, contentious today because I think you have people, you know, you have different views on this. I think at the White House about about the concept whether or not it's worthwhile. Defending forward essentially means you can keep your enemies, address them and deal with them far away from your own shores, far away from your country, stop conflict as further away from your shores as you can. And so our defend forward concept was always, you know, let's ensure that by helping, by supporting

allies in Europe, I mean, even, you know, during World War II, it was what FDR thought, let's keep things as far away from the American homeland as possible. Deal with problem sets as far away from your own shores as you can, and that will reduce the chances of you being attacked, and it will hopefully keep conflict at bay away from American citizens. Now, obviously, it's had, you know, in some ways mixed results, right? Pearl Harbor, we were attacked, 9-11, we were attacked. But that's fundamentally the concept, if you can, if you can,

contain conflict away, away from your country, defend forward. This is McKinder and others, and probably Marine Corps doctrine too, right? Well, at the tactical level, yeah, we like to cause problems for other people rather than the other way around. But at the strategic or grand strategic level, yeah, I mean, this is the cornerstone of American policy since 1945. And, you know, you meet people who will emphasize that there's a big break in our grand strategy at the end of the Cold War.

And I think there's something to be said for that, but I always like to respond that for as much as changes in our transition from this bipolar competition to a sort of unipolar moment into whatever we are now, for all that changes in those 80 years, more stays the same. We are still, we're still out there in the arasion, littorals. We've got a lot of troops in Japan, Korea, Europe, Italy, Germany, at least for the time being. The last time I checked, a lot of troops and earliest assets in the Middle East as well. So we are doing this. We have done it since 1945. And we are doing it today for all of all of the moments in the Obama administration, on and off in the Trump administration, depending on who's talking and what the issue is, where there seems to have been real discontent with this strategy. We adhere to it.

We adhere to it sort of regardless. And the real counter argument to it, I think, is not, right, that every now and then something comes through. So a wily terrorist group, you know, exploits our failures of imagination in Condoleezza Rice's memorable formulation and, you know, pulls off a 9-11. I think the real counter argument that the enemies of this strategy make is that the forward deployment provokes the aggression. That is to say, if we weren't in Japan, we weren't in Germany, we weren't in the Middle East, we wouldn't, well, first of all, we wouldn't inspire people to dislike us as much as al-Qaeda disliked us in two. 2001. I personally don't take that argument too seriously. I think it's silly. But it's kind of a dumbed down version of the more serious argument, the more serious argument, which I also disagree with, but which I think, you know, needs actual debate and refutation is that for as much as

allies can be aides, they can be problems as well. And they have their own disputes and their own regional interests. And there they are, dragging us into their wars is the populist demotic way of putting it. But they're more sophisticated and I think more respectable ways to put it that deserve a response. Yeah, and that's a bigger argument about forward defense, which is just one way of looking at strategic depth. But we've talked about cyber. I would like to get into two other examples that I think could be potentially interesting. One is kind of taking the political, political, whether it's warfare, information operations, things like that and applying it. So actually, one of the other sparks to this idea came from one of your shows, Aaron, when you interviewed Laura

Burns, I think it was, former F. Laura, yeah, Lara Burns, the expert on the Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood. And she, you know, was a really compelling episode about how the Muslim Brotherhood has for years built cadres in South in the United States very deliberately throughout education, educational institutions, mainly higher ed, right? But, you know, she explained, and she's done testimony on this, which I then went to read, how a lot of those then were sort of deployed after October 7th to great effect.

And so it really is an example of how you kind of create. So that gives the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas strategic depth in this country in that political warfare domain. And then another approach to this is thinking about our industrial basin that way, you know, our ability to respond, to recover, to produce as much as we need so that we don't run out of what we need in two weeks. That's not much strategic depth, right? So I think now the whole discussion about the industrial base, conversations about adaptability and iteration and being able to produce quickly and adapt as needed, that's also, to me, a component of strategic depth. Talk a bit about what the bad guys do when they're thinking about defending forward with us. You know, it's the United States, when critics want to talk about overextension and projecting power forward in ways that are really dramatic, they tend to cite the United States as their example. What does China do to try to build itself space and come to America, as it were, preemptively, to build itself some strategic debt?

Yeah, I mean, I think we've talked about the cyber example, and I think that that's a pretty important one. I think you could argue that probably looking at Latin America, the way they've been looking at it, the way they've been establishing, you know, supply chains there, in investing in critical minerals all around the world, that whole area essentially you could argue. You could argue that elements of Belt Road initiative were, you know, very much of that concept, being a, you know, placing yourself in key strategic locations abroad so that you have time to operate the way that you want to. The area of, you know, control of ports is another huge and important area and probably should be a case study that I look at. I mean, that's really a brilliant strategy. I mean, positioning yourself forward in so many ports around

the world, being able to control those ports potentially at different levels, I think is pretty powerful. So the sort of one-belt, one-road approach to geopolitics in a way is about building out this kind of space? Yeah. And specifically then with, you know, control of ports gives you a lot of control over how other countries can or can't use their ships or their navies, right? And their trade and get their food. I mean, it's pretty strategic and important. But yes, I think you could make an argument that Belt Road Initiative, I don't know, I don't speak Mandarin, but it'd be interesting to see if the strategic depth approach was, you know, behind it. And I mean, there are people have written about this who agree that it, that it is. I just don't, I haven't looked at sort of

primary sources translated to draw out what the terms are. The third principle that you cite in the piece about how to think about strategic depth in the present day is you call for for creating challenges for opponents, which in a way we're already talking about. Yeah. Say more about that. How does one think about creating challenges for opponents in a way that buys you space and time? Well, I mean, this is where I wonder if it may be it's becoming too broad of a concept,

but it's essentially if the Russians have to worry about or if they're, you know, if the Russians have to worry about another set of activities within their country or external to their country, they can't, you know, they're focusing less on us, less on Ukraine, let's say, or if China's worried about its supplies of, you know, if you're changing the whole landscape of critical minerals and you really do end up shifting those supply chains, you create problem sets in all different ways. They can be at the tactical level, operational level, and bigger strategic level. I mean, in a sense, effective regional balances of power and making sure and helping other countries to avoid one hegemon from taking over in their region is a form of

of creating dilemmas and problem. A little bit of uncertainty. I don't think that that's a bad thing. But on the other hand, having said that, I do think it's a valid criticism against me to say, well, not yet a certain point. The content maybe becomes too broad. And that's just good diplomatic state craft.

That's just naturally what geopolitics is about. And if we call too much strategic depth, then maybe we've, you know, the problem of calling everything national security. So that's a little bit of what I'm grappling with. Well, maybe, and I'm just making this up as I go along. So you feel free to reject this just out of hand. But maybe the issue is, as we're trying to think about strategic depth in a way that keeps it limited, the concept that is.

And we run into this issue of, okay, well, are you going to say diplomacy provides strategic depth? Yeah, yeah. In a way, the answer is obviously no. There are two different things. Strategic depth is this military term concerning space. Diplomacy is a different activity of a state. But what they have in common, and maybe this is this is my proposed solution to your problem, is they both buy time. We had Wes Mitchell actually on the show just a couple months ago making this exact point that one of the roles of diplomacy is increasing your freedom in situate freedom of choice in situations where you actually don't have the resources to just dictate terms.

And that's why you what's why you need wily and clever diplomacy. And that is sort of the traditional time-honored role of diplomacy in his view of the thing. So if traditionally space gave you time and freedom and wily diplomacy could give you time and freedom, what actually really matters is the concept of strategic depth then is really kind of a, I don't want to say subsidiary, but it's a downstream or secondary idea. The primary idea is how do you get freedom of choice? Right. To include the time you need to do the things that you need to do to achieve your goals, which may just be survival in some cases. Exactly. It's freedom of choice.

It's buying time. and it's essentially in a way the old concept of it has disappeared or is increasingly disappearing. So that might be the value too of just pointing out the old concept, which is an important concept historically, it's really no longer valid anymore, not in the same way it was. And if you're still, I think there's some value to the concept, you know, to go back to your earlier point about how you go back to old books and theorists and strategists and try to apply those principles to today. So maybe this is just a form of doing that, looking at, you know, what's enduring about the nature of war, what's changing character of war. So it goes back to things that strategists love to do.

I think you and I are both similar in that probably I find for inspiration, you know, you just pick up an old book, whether it's Klausowitz, whether it's Michael Howard, whether it's Lawrence Friedman, and just start to read. And automatically you sort of, I don't know, for me, I find that very. interesting to see what's changed and what indoors. Yeah, what's funny, though, is you can't, you can't throw out the concept completely. I mean, in a way, it's tempting. You look at Operation Spider Web and you're like, oh, well, strategic depth is done. There's no such thing. Russia doesn't have it anymore.

On the other hand, it's not, I think, was that June the 1st, I think. It was something like June the first, the attack. It's not like the Ukrainians woke up on June the second and did it again. Right. It was really, really hard. Right. Like it took a lot of effort and probably in the specific ways in which it worked. It's the kind of thing that's only going to work one.

months because once you exploit the new tech with some clever new concept one time, the Russians are going to figure out how to not let that happen to them again. And you're going to have to find some new way. So yes, things are shrinking, but the space still made it hard to do and made it impossible to replicate at mass scale. Similarly, this is something that, you know, people in the early middle Cold War had to think through all the time. When nuclear weapons first come out, they seemed, the combination of nuclear weapons and rockets

seem like they're going to change everything immediately for good, forever. So there's, there's not, I mean, my favorite early nuclear theorist who is the maligned and forgotten William Borden, who is, most people, if they have any idea at all who he is, they will remember him as the villain in the movie Oppenheimer, who turns over Oppenheimer's, I guess, FBI file to the Senate committee and gets him, gets his security clearance revoked. The real life, William Borden, who I actually think did do that, also wrote a brilliant book right after World War II. Did or did not? Did or did not? I think he did. I think he did. But I often think Oppenheimer was, let's just say, compromised. So, you know, the situation was complicated. But Borden wrote this brilliant book called There Will Be No Time, very relevant to our conversation, where he describes, this is also in the movie Oppenheimer, he describes this epiphanic experience where he's flying back on his bomber. He's a bomber pilot in 45, flying back from Northern Europe from a night mission. And a V2 flies by the bomber in a flash as they're going back across the North Sea. And the V2, you know, gets to London. in another minute or two, and he has a whole other hour to fly back to his base in East Anglia.

And he says in that moment, I realized everything had changed. The whole world had changed. Warfare was never going to be the same. And then he sort of derives from first principles what's this all going to mean about the nature of war after 1945. And one of the reasons why he's rejected and people don't really read him anymore, as opposed to Brody and other theorists, is he's kind of on the right end of the spectrum and sort of immediately contemplates that we're going to use these things. We're going to use nuclear weapons on rockets, and here's how it's going to go.

And one of the things that he derives from first principles, I think basically before any other writer, is the concept of counterforce strategy, that actually what everyone's going to do is go after each other's nukes and rockets, because that's the only thing that will make sense. And he gets that, I think, right. But what he makes a lot of other zany assertions that are obviously not right. He says, for example, that armies are now obsolete because any kind of massed military force is so vulnerable to nuclear. nuclear weapons. There's just no point. He does say that navies have a role. Navies have a role because the ships can be platforms for rockets and mobile and hard to find.

So he's happy to keep navies, but he thinks armies have to go, which, you know, he's writing this in 45. I think the book comes out in 46. And it's obviously sort of, we look at it now in 2025 and say, well, that's silly. You know, the armies didn't go anywhere. They're still here. But like thinking through why I think is relevant to our conversation, Nadia. Why didn't the armies go anywhere when Borden is right that, you know, they are vulnerable like anyone can nuclear. Well, the answer, of course, is that there are consequences to using nuclear weapons, which is why there's been no nuclear employment to include tactical nuclear employment since 1945. And so people don't use them. And they become this strategic factor in their potentiality without always, or indeed, for 80 years now, ever being used. And so you see, sorry, to land this plane, which I grant has been on kind of a long circuitous journey, you see the way in which traditional concepts of space still matter.

The Vietnam War, Korean War, Gulf War, all the wars. A lot of been a lot of wars fought where at least one power had nuclear weapons. It looks like we're, we've had India, Pakistan, you know, so we have had direct conflict between nuclear armed powers, though it's been much more limited. And these traditional, at least tactical and operational concepts of space still matter because no one's using the nukes. So it's like these multiple worlds, these old conceptions of strategy and these new conceptions of strategy are coexisting.

And that's what's so complicated for us sitting here in 2025 to think through is everything changed, but everything also stayed the same in multiple ways, in multiple ways. One, because the principles of time and freedom apply no matter what way in which you're trying to buy them, but also because the old ways in which you tried to buy them with conventional armies and just terrain, well, it's still there unless someone decides to push the apocalypse button and start dropping nukes. And you have to calculate how the one scenario could flip to the other. And, you know, it's maddeningly complex.

Okay. So I'm going to try to sum up then the point that I'm drawing from this way back. Sorry, that was a lot. To the June, the Ukrainian incursion in June into Russia. So the concept still has relevance, but to maintain it. So you have to assume that it does. Otherwise, it's not worth, you know, doing more work on it. The concept still has relevance. That's my assumption.

To maintain it, you need to work harder and differently and more creatively to keep it. It's a lot harder to keep strategic depth or to maintain it. It's not going to be with the same formula that you used in the past because there are lots of challenges to it today. So that might be, you know, one capsule of thinking about it. That was a much more elegant and efficient. That was just. It was an elegant and efficient way of summing up my rant, yes. No, no.

It got me there, actually. So it actually, it got to, I think, a key idea that can be drawn out. And I want to now, I'll go and try to find the book. There will be no time because actually that's a great title for a book. And a side moment, have you seen a Catherine Bigelow movie about the nuclear strike? Anyway, we're not going to get into that now, but there's that that's another illustration of some of this. Well, I had, you know, it's funny, I had Annie Jacobson on the show, I think earlier this year for her book on nuclear, War, which I can't, I don't think the Bigelow movie, which I've not seen in fairness, but which I'm

preternaturally disposed not to like based on what I've read about it. I mean, I like Catherine Bigelow. I thought Zero Dark 30 was an amazing movie. I didn't like the Hurt Locker. I remember not liking the Hurt Locker because it was so unrealistic in its in its details. Like there, it's funny. Then clearly somewhere between the Hurt Locker and Zero Dark 30, she decided to hire some serious consultants or do some serious study. Because to me, the mill, I mean, I can't really speak to the intelligent stuff, but the military stuff in Zero Dark 30, it's atmospheric, the way the characters talk to each other, the way they wear their gear. It all looks very right to me. Whereas in the Hurt Locker, it was just aggravating to me the way in which warfare was

being, you know, or 2000 aughts warfare was being portrayed just seemed to be a little fantastical. That all said, my reasons for not probably liking her most recent movie are because it doesn't seem to me, it seems to me to be very Annie Jacobson-esque in the portrayal of this scenario of events that are actually unlikely to occur in real life, designed for the political purpose of persuading everyone to get rid of America's nuclear weapons, which is, I think, going to generate some pretty serious consequences if we go down that road, all of which are going to be bad for us. But it does, I mean, in fairness, what's so dramatic about the scenarios that Bigelow is making her movie about, which I really do need to see, and Jacobson wrote her book about, and these

are two, you know, very smart people. Bigelow's a great artist. Jacobson. is a very talented journalist, is this specter of the nation state and the leaders of the nation state and the president of the United States and his senior advisors or her senior advisors having to act tactically, having to act with no time. Exactly. It's not having the time to respond, to think, to develop a counter strategy. So it is time. And that's why, you know, missile defense while really hard is pretty important. And the Israelis know that. But obviously very hard to achieve when it comes to ballistic missiles, right? And so we don't, yeah, we don't have to go back to the movie. But I think it is ultimately you realize how short time is sometimes in some of these potential scenarios. Nadia Shadlow of the Hudson Institute, writing about strategic depth.

It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. I always enjoy comparing notes with you. And thank you so much for making the time to come on School of War. Thank you for helping me think through this. and love being on your show. Thanks.