Barry R. Posen is the Ford international professor of political science of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a Council on Foreign Relations fellow assigned to the office of the U.S. secretary of defense in 1982, he worked on issues related to the Soviet Ground Forces and armored breakthrough operations along the inner-German border. He has previously written about the armored breakthrough problem in “Breakthroughs: Armored Offensives in Western Europe 1944.”
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Barry R. Posen
A dozen or so tiny figures are scattered across a bulldozed dirt landscape, picking their way around the rubble of a leveled building in the foreground. Devastated mid-rise towers stand in ruins in the distance with their windows blown out.
Slavian, a former Russian special forces sergeant who now fights for Ukraine after living in the country for a decade with his Ukrainian wife, gestures to keep quiet as he moves along front-line tenches toward a Russian position in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on Oct. 27, 2022.
TAJI, IRAQ - APRIL 12: A U.S. Army trainer (L), instructs an Iraqi Army recruit at a military base on April 12, 2015 in Taji, Iraq. U.S. forces, currently operating in 5 large bases throught the country, are training thousands of Iraqi Army combat troops, trying to rebuild a force they had origninally trained before the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2010. Members of the U.S. Army's 5-73 CAV, 3BCT, 82nd Airborne Division are teaching members of the newly-formed 15th Division of the Iraqi Army, as the Iraqi government launches offensives to try to recover territory lost to ISIS last year. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
