Military Affairs & Warfare
A Break in the Clouds: Learning Lessons From the Sea
Learning lessons from past and current wars is a complicated endeavor, given observers’ personal and institutional preferences and other challenges. Nonetheless, Frank Hoffman and George P. Garrett argue that carefully drawn lessons based on access to more…
Estimating China’s Defense Spending: How to Get It Wrong (and Right)
China’s defense spending is opaque, and China spends more on defense than its official 2024 defense budget of 1.67 trillion yuan ($232 billion) indicates. Some analysts claim China’s defense spending is equivalent to $700 billion, approaching the level of…
Climate Change and Military Power: Hunting for Submarines in the Warming Ocean
Climate change will have significant effects on military power, capabilities, effectiveness, and employment. Yet, scholars have paid little attention to this topic. We address this gap by investigating the effects of changing ocean conditions on anti-submarine…
Shining a Light on the Defense Department’s Industrial Base Problems
With the recent release of the National Defense Industrial Strategy, the Defense Department has acknowledged the urgency of strengthening the linkages between a healthy defense industrial base and U.S. military power. Despite this, the views of defense-tech…
Speaking Out: Why Retired Flag Officers Participate in Political Discourse
Recent years have seen retired general and flag officers make a variety of political statements and campaign endorsements, sparking enormous controversy and debate among scholars about the fate of the military’s norm of nonpartisanship. Despite this, we have…
Marine Force Design: Changes Overdue Despite Critics’ Claims
The Marine Corps’ Force Design 2030, written under the direction of the 38th commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. David Berger, has been the target of much criticism since its release in 2020. In this article, former Undersecretary of the Navy and Deputy…
The Organizational Determinants of Military Doctrine: A History of Army Information Operations
For the past four decades, the U.S. Army has made repeated attempts to create an enduring doctrinal framework that describes the role of information in conflict, yet these attempts have been largely unsuccessful. What accounts for this struggle? More broadly,…
The Moral Legitimacy of Drone Strikes: How the Public Forms Its Judgments
Scholars often relate how the public views drone strikes to one of three moral norms: soldiers’ battlefield courage, the protection of soldiers, or preventing civilian casualties. But what explains variation in the public’s perceptions of what constitutes…
Principals with Agency: Assessing Civilian Deference to the Military
When and why do civilian policymakers defer to military expertise? Although scholars agree that civilian deference to military expertise is important to assess the health of civil-military relations, there is much less agreement over the causes of deference,…
Technology Acquisition and Arms Control: Thinking Through the Hypersonic Weapons Debate
Debates in the United States about hypersonic weapons today revolve around acquiring hypersonic missiles and pursuing arms control initiatives, but concern about a hypersonic gap is misplaced and indicates a misunderstanding about the strategic trade-offs and…
The Human Factor: The Enduring Relevance of Protecting Civilians in Future Wars
The U.S. military has shifted from a counterinsurgency “population-centric” approach to an enemy-centric one, focused on destroying an enemy through decisive victory. And yet it should be careful not to cast aside measures to protect civilians as a vestige…
Not a Suicide Pact: Urgent Strategic Recommendations for Reducing Domestic Terrorism in the United States
Barbara McQuade reviews the Biden administration's National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, discusses the constitutional challenges of combating domestic terrorism, and proposes some additional steps that are necessary for addressing this growing…