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Ghost in the Machine: Coming to Terms with the Human Core of Unmanned War

Ghost in the Machine: Coming to Terms with the Human Core of Unmanned War

The widespread assumption that the United States can achieve favorable outcomes in war with more machines and fewer humans must be subjected to rigorous scrutiny. This article challenges that assumption through a historical inquiry guided by the catalysts for…

Negotiating Primacy: Strategic Stability, Superpower Arms Control, and the End of the Cold War

Negotiating Primacy: Strategic Stability, Superpower Arms Control, and the End of the Cold War

The United States successfully used the concept of strategic stability to tip the nuclear balance against the Soviet Union during the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) of the 1980s and early 1990s. Both superpowers sought to employ strategic stability to…

Expanding the Margins for Success: Corbett’s Maritime Strategy Theories and the United States Since 1945

Expanding the Margins for Success: Corbett’s Maritime Strategy Theories and the United States Since 1945

Though Julian S. Corbett wrote for Britain at the turn of the twentieth century, his maritime strategic concepts can apply more broadly to spotlight key challenges the United States has faced since the Second World War. Corbett’s theoretical concepts can…

Called to Testify: Congressional Oversight of the Armed Forces

Called to Testify: Congressional Oversight of the Armed Forces

Committee hearings are a key mechanism by which Congress conducts oversight and shapes defense policy. The expertise Congress chooses to draw upon in these settings can have important implications for the substance of national security choices, the time…

Speaking Out: Why Retired Flag Officers Participate in Political Discourse 

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

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

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,…

Fixing Democracy: The Election Security Crisis and Solutions for Mending It

Fixing Democracy: The Election Security Crisis and Solutions for Mending It

The 2000 presidential election debacle in Florida led to the widespread adoption of electronic voting machines in the United States. Yet these machines have proven to be more problematic than the punch card machines that precipitated Florida's crisis. Poorly…

The Simulation of Scandal: Hack-and-Leak Operations, the Gulf States, and U.S. Politics

The Simulation of Scandal: Hack-and-Leak Operations, the Gulf States, and U.S. Politics

Four hack-and-leak operations in U.S. politics between 2016 and 2019, publicly attributed to the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, should be seen as the “simulation of scandal" — deliberate attempts to direct moral judgment against their…

Recentering the United States in the Historiography of American Foreign Relations

Recentering the United States in the Historiography of American Foreign Relations

In the last three decades, historians of the “U.S. in the World” have taken two methodological turns — the international and transnational turns — that have implicitly decentered the United States from the historiography of U.S. foreign relations.…

Policy Roundtable: Does Reagan’s Foreign Policy Legacy Live On?

Policy Roundtable: Does Reagan’s Foreign Policy Legacy Live On?

We convened a roundtable to discuss Reagan's foreign policy legacy, its place in the Trump doctrine, and its future in the GOP.

America’s Relation to World Order: Two Indictments, Two Thought Experiments, and a Misquotation

America’s Relation to World Order: Two Indictments, Two Thought Experiments, and a Misquotation

The State is undergoing a crisis of legitimacy owing to its inability to cope with novel problems of weapons proliferation, transnational threats including climate change, a fragile global financial infrastructure, cultural influences carried by electronic…