Military Affairs & Warfare
Fighting Without Holding: Why Military Operations Fail to Produce Security in West Africa
States across West Africa have expanded military deployments, acquired new equipment, and deepened security partnerships to confront violent militant groups. Yet these efforts have often produced temporary disruption rather than durable security. This article…
Virtuous Violence and the Psychology of Nuclear Escalation
Paul Slovic, Rose McDermott, and Daniel R. Post argue that nuclear strategy too often assumes rational, stable decision-making despite decades of psychological research on bounded rationality and bias. Drawing on survey experiments based on the Sagan and…
When Our Minds Go Nuclear: Rethinking Nuclear Strategy Through the Psychology of Risk and Decision-Making
Cognitive biases can systematically distort judgments about the use of nuclear weapons, potentially undermining nuclear stability and increasing the risk of nuclear war. In survey experiments with nearly 3,000 US participants, we show how psychological…
New Tech, Old Traps: The Persistent Pitfalls in Military Innovation
Herb Lin joins the podcast and explains US reliance on technological overmatch through the first offset (nuclear deterrence against Soviet conventional superiority), second offset (high-tech conventional systems like precision-guided munitions and stealth),…
Challenges and Opportunities for AI in Military Systems
Michael Horowitz discusses his recent TNSR article tackling misconceptions about AI, how militaries have long used algorithms, and why use cases and data matter—especially when nuclear applications rely on simulated data. He examines human-machine teaming,…
Beyond the Hype: The Reality of Precision-Strike Weapons in Ukraine
Cameron Tracy joins to discuss his TNSR article on “technological surprise” and “normalization through use” in the Russo-Ukrainian war. He explains how forecasting about warfare often overweights extreme scenarios and is reinforced by professional and…
Psychological Biases in the Era of Nuclear Weapons and AI
Rose McDermott explains how common judgment biases can undermine nuclear deterrence and strategic stability, especially under time pressure and with emerging technologies like AI, using Kahneman’s Type 1 (fast, intuitive) and Type 2 (slow, analytic) thinking…
Ensuring US Military Readiness in the Indo-Pacific
Eyck Freymann and Harry Halem argue that the United States can sustain conventional deterrence against China into the 2030s through targeted investments in logistics and the industrial base. They join our editors to discuss why a holistic view of the military…
US Military Primacy and Alliance Resilience
In 1956, the Suez Crisis revealed the limits of British power. Could a similar event hollow out the US alliance system today? Bence Nemeth applies his "five factor theory of defense cooperation" to answer this critical question.
Conventional Options Theory in the New Nuclear Era
Tyler Bowen from the US Naval War College joins us to discuss the logic of conventional coercion in nuclear crises. As the US faces nuclear-armed adversaries like Russia and China, understanding how to "thread the needle" between defense and escalation is…
The Arsenal of Democracy: Keeping China Deterred in an Age of Hard Choices
The margin of deterrence against China is rapidly shrinking, driven not by a failure of US technological innovation, but by the American and allied defense industrial base’s inability to field and sustain cutting-edge capabilities at scale, at speed, and…
How a US “Suez Moment” Could Hollow the US Alliance System
This article contends that while the United States still fields potent military capabilities, the narrowing military balance with China means that a future Indo-Pacific clash in which Beijing gains a regional edge is no longer implausible. Using the 1956…