Naval War College Reading Room Archives: Archived List

Quantum sensing is primed for a breakout that will radically change both conventional and nuclear warfare, requiring essential reforms for the Department of Defense (recently renamed to the Department of War) to maintain a competitive advantage. Submarines, stealth bombers, and advanced fifth-generation fighters form the backbone of the United States’ deterrent posture through their survivability and ability to penetrate adversary defenses undetected. Quantum sensing technologies detect atomic-scale interactions in gravity, magnetism, and light, which could nullify weapon systems that rely on stealth and invisibility. Just as radar transformed the air war over Europe in World War II, so too will quantum sensing alter air and undersea warfare.

In 1935, U.S. General Billy Mitchell testified to Congress: "I believe that in the future, whoever controls Alaska will control the planet. I think it's the most strategically important place in the world." Mitchell may not have foreseen the melting of ice, hypersonic weapons, or the return of great-power rivalry. But he quickly recognized that Alaska – and with it the Arctic – occupied a unique position at the crossroads of global security.

The training, advising, and equipping of foreign forces is as old as warfare itself. During the Peloponnesian War, Sparta and Athens did more than just fight each other—they trained, supported, and leveraged allies to project influence and win wars. From Roman military missions to Soviet support for communist movements, to the modern American security assistance industrial complex (i.e., advisor units, private military contractors), the logic is perennial: build others to fight in your interest, or at least in your image.

After you have logged in to the NWC Library catalog with your CAC or NWC Blackboard account, click on the "MIT Press Journals" link in the Online Access options to access the volume that contains the titled article.

Existing scholarship emphasizes hawks’ advantages in making peace, but it is squarely focused on electorally accountable leaders, even though most international rivalries feature at least one leader who faces no meaningful electoral check. I argue that electoral accountability moderates the relationship between foreign policy preferences and rapprochement. In low electoral accountability autocracies where citizens struggle to punish leaders, the credibility problem that doves face in selling peace at home becomes less important than their motivation to cooperate internationally. As a result, doves, not hawks, should be more successful peacemakers in autocracies. I test the theory by analyzing two prominent cases of rapprochement: the end of the Cold War under Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s; and the end of the Egypt-Israel rivalry in the late 1970s under Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat.

In the aftermath of World War II, the need for a unified defense against looming threats led to NATO’s formation in 1949. Formed as a beacon of stability, democracy, and economic recovery, NATO has evolved into the cornerstone of transatlantic security. It institutionally knits together defense, diplomacy, and economic prosperity into a unified front.

In July 2023, China announced export licensing for gallium and germanium, sharply restricting flows and creating immediate friction across global supply chains. Spot prices for gallium spiked by more than 40 percent in Europe, leading to longer lead times andforcing chip fabs to draw down inventories and prioritize critical programs. Shipments could not leave China until licenses were approved, forcing sellers to wait, and some buyers to tap into stockpiles.

Dr. Jahara Matisek, James Langan, Andrew Rolander, and CIWAG Director David A. Brown, COL (Ret.) build on discussions from CIWAG's 2025 Maritime Symposium, co-sponsored with the Naval War College Foundation, and expanding on key insights shared in "The Trident" podcast episode on maritime sabotage, this paper demonstrates why protecting critical undersea infrastructure is no longer optional—it’s urgent. "Growing numbers of incidents and the destruction of pipelines and cables in the waters around Europe and Taiwan signal a global shift: the seabed has become a contested battlespace. The combination of difficulty of detection and attribution, plus the severe consequences to economic security, requires a unified transatlantic/transpacific strategy."

Tsushima helped a rising Asian power consolidate its regional standing, set that power on the path to destruction in World War II, and fired anti-imperial passions the world over.

Long-range weapons will not totally reshape war as we know it—but they could blur the difference between offensive and defensive operations.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) views deception as a force multiplier and war-winning weapon. The PLA leadership reserves a special place of veneration for wartime commanders who can employ deception to obtain surprise, something Xi Jinping refers to as “excelling at stratagem.”

All in all, the expansion of USV use is a promising experiment that could ameliorate the US Navy’s force-structure woes—while amplifying US fleets’ combat power in a hurry.

The US military runs on JP-8 jet fuel. Besides powering bombers, fighters, and helicopters it also fuels most US Army vehicles like M1 Abrams tanks and even the tactical generators that keep forward operating bases alive. Most engines on US Navy vessels can also use JP-8, if needed. All of NATO uses the same fuel for its aviation assets, meaning JP-8 is the lifeblood of modern military power.

If international law no longer serves as its own barrier to cross-border aggression, well-armed alliances need to stand up for it—or risk seeing a beneficial world order come to ruin.

Two years ago, Wagner Group frontman Yevgeny Prigozhin was killed in a plane crash along with the group’s top deputies. A fiery propagandist and restaurateur turned mercenary warlord, Prigozhin led a mutiny against the Russian Defense Ministry in June 2023, just two months prior to his demise. The rebellion, spurred on by Wagner’s treatment in the Ukraine war and interpersonal conflicts between Prigozhin and Russia’s top brass, culminated with a dramatic scene of a Wagner column approaching Moscow before ultimately being called off. Prigozhin’s act of betrayal had all but sealed his fate and set into motion the government’s efforts to reel in the beast it had created in the Wagner Group. Just a couple years later, the Central African Republic stands as Wagner’s sole remaining foothold. Meanwhile, the group’s successor, the Africa Corps, has built on its foundations and is making inroads into several new African countries.

Alliances are worthless. Don’t believe me? Then take it from General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who choreographed the Allied offensive against Nazi Germany more than 80 years ago and knew firsthand the frustrations and misadventures that come with leading polyglot armies, navies, and air forces.

Classroom Professional Military Education alone is insufficient to provide the requisite cognitive capability to design, plan, and command major operations and campaigns. Professional Military Education is a topic of constant discourse. Taking the education beyond the classroom by adding case studies, war game techniques, and field studies develops field grade officers’ intuition, knowledge, analytical planning skills, and commanders’ empathy. This article covers a campaign of learning to build upon traditional andragogical methods by incorporating vigorous techniques to immerse war college students in the art of decision-making at the operational level of war.

Rather than trying to emulate China’s hostile and aggressive communications strategy during disputes in the Indo-Pacific, US Navy leaders should poke fun at it. The United States Navy needs to get its swagger back—particularly in the realm of public diplomacy. The sea service missed a major opportunity to wage cognitive warfare against China on August 11, when a China Coast Guard cutter accidentally collided with a frontline People’s Liberation Army Navy destroyer while the two vessels were pursuing a Philippine Coast Guard cutter near Scarborough Shoal.

The Taiwan of 1950 is no longer, but the Taiwan of today is even more worthy of defense by the US for reasons ranging from US self-interest to ideology. Securing America’s economic interests in Taiwan requires protecting our regional security interests, which necessitates maintaining credibility with allies and partners. This, in turn, demands meaningful defense of sovereignty and particularly of liberal democracies. These are intrinsically linked, and successfully doing so can ultimately justify Americans' view of their own exceptionalism.

"As the newly installed thirty-seventh President of the U.S. Naval War College (NWC), Vice Admiral Stansfield Turner addressed the community at an all-hands and asked the following:
'What is the purpose and objective of having a War College? Why are we here?
How do we fit into the broad overall Navy? Where do we make our contribution?'
These simple questions to the faculty gathered in Spruance Auditorium marked the beginning of the “Turner Revolution” at the College..."

The contemporary grand strategy debate between deep engagement and restraint is inadequate both to contemporary geopolitical realities and to the strategies American presidents have actually pursued in recent decades. This updated typology of grand strategies sets the stage for a reinvigorated and more informed debate and research program.

How vulnerable is the continental United States to drone attack? Could a wily adversary cause vast destruction of military assets on U.S. soil at a fraction of the cost it would take to replace them? Ukraine and Israel’s stunning drone attacks against high value targets deep within Russia and Iran, respectively, in June 2025 raise serious questions about whether the United States homeland will remain a sanctuary. America has long enjoyed the advantages of favorable geography. Aside from nuclear-armed missiles, the continental United States has largely remained out of reach of conventional kinetic attacks from major adversaries.

China has outperformed Imperial Germany as a burgeoning maritime power. During the fin de siècle decades, German naval potentates—chiefly Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the Kaiser’s state secretary for the navy—talked themselves into believing they could accomplish their goals by putting to sea a “risk fleet” a fraction the size of the enemy’s, the presumable enemy being Great Britain’s Royal Navy. China has done Admiral Tirpitz one better. It has outbuilt the entirety of its major nemesis, the US Navy, positioning Chinese forces well to face the fraction of the Navy they will face on likely oceanic battlefields. Germans could only have dreamt of accomplishing as much.

As conflict looms throughout the world, the United States must again learn lessons from its failed conflicts in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Both conflicts featured blurry battle lines, nebulous objectives, undefinable victories, and inhospitable terrain that nullified the U.S. airpower and physically punished its ground forces. For a Presidential administration deciding if or when to intervene in a foreign country, the failures of Vietnam and Afghanistan should be a crucial influence in whatever foreign policy decision the administration makes.

In spite of its early ineptitude, the Russian Army might ultimately be able to replicate Lincoln’s winning strategy, concentrating offensives in time to score a breakthrough into the Ukrainian interior.

For years, joint professional military education (JPME) has been an easy punching bag. In 2018, Secretary of Defense James Mattis famously claimed professional military education had stagnated. His statement drew a great deal of attention, with some JPME programs responding in frustration that the ever-evolving nature of their curricula was being ignored. Others who have criticized JPME misunderstand its purpose and miss the real adaptations JPME has continually made for the joint force and the nation. It is time to put an end to the notion that JPME is stagnant. We aim to set the record straight.

International Law Studies, Volume 106, 2025

This article analyzes the legality of U.S. unilateral seabed mining authorized by Executive Order 14285, signed by President Donald Trump on April 24, 2025, permitting mineral extraction on the U.S. continental shelf and international deep seabed. Critics, including China, the European Union, and the International Seabed Authority, contend that this policy violates international law by circumventing Part XI of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which designates seabed minerals as the “common heritage of mankind” and mandates regulation through the ISA. The article asserts that, as a non-party to UNCLOS, the United States is not bound by the terms of the treaty. While the United States signed the 1994 Implementing Agreement, the action has no legal effect under Article 4(2) unless the State also consents to be bound by UNCLOS itself. Further, even if Part XI constitutes customary international law, the United States qualifies as a persistent objector, having consistently operated pursuant to the 1980 Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act (DSHMRA). Through sustained State practice—encompassing legislative measures, executive actions, and NOAA-issued mining licenses—the United States has explicitly rejected Part XI’s regulatory authority.

Lecture Recommendation: August 4, 2025

It is 02:35:01Z, March 22, 2026, inside a dimly lit Forward U.S. Joint Operations Center. Screens pulse in gentle waves each a second long, reflecting streams of updated data. Unseen beneath layers of code, an advanced military logistics AI agent combs through decades of global supply chain records, hunting for subtle patterns in what looks like chaos. Abruptly, it pauses: an anomaly. Historical pricing data on iron, copper, and coal — echoes reminiscent of the lead-up to Japan’s surprise assault on Port Arthur in 1904 — begin aligning with current market movements.

Lecture Recommendation: August 4, 2025

The first nation to field Artificial Generative Intelligence (AGI) wins everything!

True AGI will be able to rewrite its own code and scale its cognitive capacity at speeds that will leave slow-footed rivals in the dust. In such a contest there is no silver medal—only a collection of also-rans falling increasingly far behind.

Lecture Recommendation: August 4, 2025

The artificial intelligence revolution has arrived in military education, and resistance is futile. AI now stands poised to fundamentally transform how we educate military professionals — whether educators are ready or not.

If haste has come to be the lodestone of force design, then the Navy’s leadership is probably best off pouring its resources into the clutch of smaller naval drones optimal for sea denial.
Over at the Naval Institute Proceedings this month, retired naval engineer and surface-warfare officer (go, team!) Jack Rowley holds forth regarding the U.S. Navy’s fitful effort to put a “hybrid” fleet to sea. Once fielded, a hybrid fleet design augments traditional crewed ships of war with a sizable contingent of uncrewed surface and subsurface vehicles—bulking up the fleet with new hulls, at low cost, and in relatively short order compared to the agonizingly prolonged process of constructing major combatants. In particular, Rowley frets that the Navy appears irresolute about fielding a coterie of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs).

In May 2025, the Pentagon announced plans to shutter two of the Army’s six security force assistance brigades (SFABs) and to downsize Security Force Assistance Command into a small shop of about three dozen personnel within US Army Forces Command. This decision ignores clear doctrinal and operational evidence demonstrating SFABs’ strategic value—from Field Manual 3-22 accounting for the utility of Gulf War advising to how the Korean Military Advisory Group was pivotal in halting North Korea’s initial assault in 1950. Yet, SFABs today face shrinking personnel authorizations and institutional ambivalence about their future.

The “Liberty Lifter” fits neatly into the operational concepts sculpting how US joint forces intend to compete and win in the Western Pacific.
All hail the “ekranoplan”! The US military may have hit on a partial solution to its logistics woes in the Pacific. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched the “Liberty Lifter” program, a venture intended to field a surface-hugging seaplane with the hauling capacity of a C-130 cargo plane (or eventually more).

When China imposed export controls on seven of the seventeen rare earth elements in April 2025, it wasn’t just a trade policy tweak—it was a shot across the bow of the US defense industrial base. American fighter jets, satellites, guided missiles, and submarines all rely on high-performance magnets built with rare earths like neodymium, samarium, and dysprosium. This blocking action by China followed earlier prohibitions on gallium and germanium, which are foundational to infrared optics and radar systems. These materials are overwhelmingly Chinese controlled, processed, and manufactured—and American reliance on foreign minerals and rare earths exposes critical vulnerabilities.

In Mali, rebel Tuareg forces sifted through the wreckage of a Turkish-supplied drone on the night of April 1. The platform, a Bayraktar Akinci surveillance drone operated by Malian armed forces, had plummeted to earth near the Algerian-Malian border. Shortly after the downing, the Algerian Army issued a statement claiming it had shot down the drone because it had entered Algerian airspace, a claim vehemently disputed by the Malian Foreign Ministry. The event showcases the growing tensions between Algiers and Bamako, but it also highlights a larger point—the proliferation of drones in Africa has not gone as smoothly as military leaders might have expected. As the past few years have shown, drones have not dramatically shifted the balance for African militaries. While they may add a modern capability to military arsenals and may even offer some tactical advantages, drones are far from a remedy for the entrenched insecurity that plagues many on the continent.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) faces strategic vulnerabilities in the European high north due to growing Russian and Chinese collaboration. Leveraging scenario planning and enhanced integration of Nordic capabilities into Joint Force Command Norfolk is recommended to bolster Arctic deterrence. Clarified command structures, specialized polar-warfare units, targeted infrastructure investments, and expanded Joint exercises are essential. This would strengthen NATO’s Arctic posture, ensuring regional stability and enabling the U.S. strategic pivot toward countering China’s growing global influence in the Indo-Pacific.

Keywords: strategic competition, China, Russia, polar warfare, Arctic, cold weather operations, NATO, combined Joint forces

Former Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral Michael Gilday tasked the fleet to adopt a “Get Real, Get Better” culture that “assesses, corrects, and innovates better than the opposition,” ultimately unlocking “the full potential of our people.”1 This approach calls on Navy sailors to be their own toughest critics and embrace both their strengths and shortcomings after rigorous self-assessment.

Journal of Military History, July 2025

Traditional accounts of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu focused on the clash of French and Vietnamese forces at the close of the Indochina War. They emphasize the local learning by the two combatants. This article examines the neglected role of the two great power sponsors of the Indochina War, the United States. and the People's Republic of China. Both sought to transfer operational concepts developed while fighting in Korea. While the French and the Viet Minh adopted much of the hardware and doctrine, the terms of this technology transfer and the local conditions favored the Vietnamese. Chinese advisors offered the Vietnamese a more effective combination of advice and assistance than the U.S. offered to the French. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Copyright of Journal of Military History is the property of Society for Military History and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A Review Essay in Volume 15 of the Defence In Strategic Communications, the official Journal of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence.

Lecture Recommendation: June 24, 2025

The Center for Irregular Warfare and Armed Group's (CIWAG) held a Symposium "Shadows & Sabotage" that took place, 23-25 June 2025. This book was recommended for further reading and knowledge on the topics being discussed.

In Sentinels of the Sea, intelligence veteran George Guy Thomas, author of A Silent Warrior Steps Out of the Shadows, presents the inside story of his struggles in his post-9/11 crusade for security on the seas, which led him to conceive and implement Satellite Automatic Identification System ship tracking and a concept he calls C-SIGMA (Collaboration in Space for International Global Maritime Awareness). But Thomas, a quadruple qualified (surface, air, submarine, space) retired Navy commander, warns that American ports remain vulnerable as he presses for global cooperation in patrolling the seas from space for safety and security.Thomas is nominated for the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the nation's highest honor for technological achievement, "for overcoming severe obstacles and dramatically changing the maritime world by lifting the veil of opaqueness enshrouding the seas."

Lecture Recommendation: June 24, 2025

The Center for Irregular Warfare and Armed Group's (CIWAG) held a Symposium "Shadows & Sabotage" that took place, 23-25 June 2025. This article was mentioned during a lecture.

Diluting federal support for critical minerals across arbitrary commodities like coal weakens the U.S.’s ability to stabilize critical mineral supply chains.

China and the United States are locked in an intensifying security competition, much of it revolving around—but increasingly transcending—Taiwan's continued autonomy. The operational value of a Chinese-controlled Taiwan has been cited as one reason for the US military to concentrate on stopping unification by force. Using a simple, replicable, three-component model of a “kill chain,” this article compares the potential effect of Chinese military capabilities, with and without Taiwan, on the shape and size of the contested zone in which US and allied air and naval forces would operate in wartime. The article draws three conclusions. First, because China already poses a significant military threat to US sea control and allied territory, the transformation of Taiwan into a fully pacified, militarized Chinese territory would make little difference to the broader military balance. Second, Chinese wartime space capabilities play a greater role in kill-chain effectiveness than any piece of territory. Third, even if a forcibly united Taiwan improves China’s ability to target US naval ships, this scenario only matters if there are ships left to target. Optimizing the US military for Taiwan’s defense risks undermining US and allied capabilities for a wider and lengthier conflict. Finally, the article recommends steps to defend Taiwan that would maintain an invasion as China’s—and not the United States’—“pacing scenario.”

The U.S. defense community has developed a healthy obsession with innovation. AI, modeling and simulation, machine learning — these are the buzzwords driving conversations about the future of warfare. But when it comes to integrating these technologies into one of the military’s most valuable tools for strategic insight — the wargame — the defense community would do well to proceed with caution.

Subjects: Wargamming, AI, Strategic Insight

Lecture Recommendation: June 16, 2025

Using the link provided you can request a copy of this book via Interlibrary Loan using your USNWC CAC or Blackboard credentials.

This book is a history of the evolution of Pakistan's nuclear weapons management system, including its nuclear doctrine and the measures in place to secure and safeguard them. This work highlights the elements that went into the formulation of Pakistan's nuclear policy. The book's great significance lies in the fact that it tackles the little known subject of nuclear learning most comprehensively in all its dimensions. With great clarity and balance, the author clearly highlights the discernible aspects of Pakistan's learning experience and establishes beyond doubt that Pakistan has learnt from crises events and has evolved into a responsible nuclear weapons state with effective command, control, and custodial arrangements in place.

Lecture Recommendation: June 16, 2025

Using the link provided, you can access the book using your USNWC CAC or Blackboard credentials.

 A groundbreaking account of Pakistan's rise as a nuclear power draws on elite interviews and primary sources to challenge long-held misconceptions Pakistan's pathway to developing nuclear weapons remains shrouded in mystery and surrounded by misconceptions. While it is no secret why Pakistan became a nuclear power, how Pakistan became a nuclear state has been obscured by mythmaking. In Pakistan's Pathway to the Bomb, Mansoor Ahmed offers a revisionist history of Pakistan's nuclear program and the bureaucratic politics that shaped its development from its inception in 1956 until the 1998 nuclear tests. Drawing on elite interviews and previously untapped primary sources, Ahmed offers a fresh assessment of the actual and perceived roles and contributions of the scientists and engineers who led the nuclear program. He shows how personal ambitions and politics within Pakistan's strategic enclave generated inter-laboratory competition in the nuclear establishment, which determined nuclear choices for the country for more than two decades. It also produced unexpected consequences such as illicit proliferation to other countries largely outside of the Pakistani state's control. As Pakistan's nuclear deterrent program continues to grow, Pakistan's Pathway to the Bomb provides fresh insights into how this nuclear power has evolved in the past and where it stands today. Scholars and students of security studies, Pakistani history, and nuclear proliferation will find this book to be invaluable to their understanding of the country's nuclear program, policies, and posture.

Lecture Recommendation: June 16, 2025

You can follow the link and use your USNWC Blackboard credentials to request a copy of this book via Interlibrary Loan.

In this book, a leading authority on India's nuclear program offers an informed and thoughtful assessment of India's nuclear strategy. He shows that the country's nuclear-strategic culture is generally in accord with the principle of minimum deterrence, but is sometimes inconsistent and has a tendency to drift into a more open-ended process. He addresses areas of concern, notably the relationship between minimum deterrence and subnuclear conflict, the threat from nuclear terrorism, and the special challenges nuclear weapons pose for a democratic society.

Lecture Recommendation: June 16, 2025

Using the link provided you can request a copy of this book via Interlibrary Loan using your USNWC CAC or Blackboard credentials.

Lecture Recommendation: June 16, 2025

Using the link provided you can access an e-book, or request a physical copy via Interlibrary Loan using your USNWC CAC or Blackboard credentials.

After a hiatus of almost 24 years, India startled the international community by resuming nuclear testing in May 1998. Pakistan responded later the same month with five nuclear tests of its own. The belief that the nuclear tests in South Asia have not only altered the strategic environment in the region but also transformed New Delhi into a nuclear weapons power recurs constantly in Indian strategic and political analyses. This book will address these issues in the context of a broader understanding of India's strategic interests, its institutional structures, and its security goals. The author argues that the truth of the matter is much more complex than most Indian analysts believe and that despite demonstrating and ability to successfully undertake nuclear explosions, India still has some way to go before it can acquire the capabilties that would make it a consequential nuclear power. Copyright © Libri GmbH

Lecture Recommendation: June 16, 2025

The history of Pakistan's nuclear program is the history of Pakistan. Fascinated with the new nuclear science, the young nation's leaders launched a nuclear energy program in 1956 and consciously interwove nuclear developments into the broader narrative of Pakistani nationalism. Then, impelled first by the 1965 and 1971 India-Pakistan Wars, and more urgently by India's first nuclear weapon test in 1974, Pakistani senior officials tapped into the country's pool of young nuclear scientists and engineers and molded them into a motivated cadre committed to building the 'ultimate weapon.' The tenacity of this group and the central place of its mission in Pakistan's national identity allowed the program to outlast the perennial political crises of the next 20 years, culminating in the test of a nuclear device in 1998. Written by a 30-year professional in the Pakistani Army who played a senior role formulating and advocating Pakistan's security policy on nuclear and conventional arms control, this book tells the compelling story of how and why Pakistan's government, scientists, and military, persevered in the face of a wide array of obstacles to acquire nuclear weapons. It lays out the conditions that sparked the shift from a peaceful quest to acquire nuclear energy into a full-fledged weapons program, details how the nuclear program was organized, reveals the role played by outside powers in nuclear decisions, and explains how Pakistani scientists overcome the many technical hurdles they encountered. Thanks to General Khan's unique insider perspective, it unveils and unravels the fascinating and turbulent interplay of personalities and organizations that took place and reveals how international opposition to the program only made it an even more significant issue of national resolve. Listen to a podcast of a related presentation by Feroz Khan at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation at cisac.stanford.edu/events/recording/7458/2/765.

Lecture Recommendation: June 16, 2025

Using the link provided you can access an electronic copy or request a physical copy of this book via Interlibrary Loan using your USNWC CAC or Blackboard credentials.

In May 1998, India shocked the world--and many of its own citizens--by detonating five nuclear weapons in the Rajasthan desert. Why did India bid for nuclear weapon status at a time when 149 nations had signed a ban on nuclear testing? What drove India's new Hindu nationalist government to depart from decades of nuclear restraint, a control that no other nation with similar capacities had displayed? How has U.S. nonproliferation policy affected India's decision making? India's Nuclear Bomb is the definitive, comprehensive history of how the world's largest democracy, has grappled with the twin desires to have and to renounce the bomb. Each chapter contains significant historical revelations drawn from scores of interviews with India's key scientists, military leaders, diplomats and politicians, and from declassified U.S. government documents and interviews with U.S. officials. Perkovich teases out the cultural and ethical concerns and vestiges of colonialism that underlie India's seemingly paradoxical stance. India's nuclear history challenges leading theories of why nations pursue and hang onto nuclear weapons, raising important questions for international relations theory and security studies. So, too, the blasts in Rajasthan have shaken the foundations of the international nonproliferation system. With the end of the Cold War and an even more chaotic international scene, Perkovich's analysis of an alternative model is timely, sobering, and vital.

Lecture Recommendation: June 16, 2025

Using the link provided you can request a copy of this book via Interlibrary Loan using your USNWC CAC or Blackboard credentials.

The Security Imperative: Pakistan's Nuclear Deterrence and Diplomacy by Zamir Akram Explore the intricate world of nuclear strategy, deterrence, and diplomacy in Pakistan's security paradigm with this authoritative analysis by Zamir Akram, a seasoned diplomat and expert on international relations. This book delves into Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine, its regional security challenges, and the evolving geopolitical landscape. It offers first-hand insights into Pakistan’s nuclear policy, strategic stability in South Asia, and diplomatic efforts to balance deterrence with global non-proliferation norms.

Lecture Recommendation: June 16, 2025

Using the link provided you can access an electronic copy using your USNWC CAC or Blackboard credentials. Only three users allowed concurrently.

India's nuclear profile, doctrine, and practices have evolved rapidly since the country's nuclear breakout in 1998. However, the outside world's understanding of India's doctrinal debates, forward-looking strategy, and technical developments are still two decades behind the present. India and Nuclear Asia will fill that gap in our knowledge by focusing on the post-1998 evolution of Indian nuclear thought, its arsenal, the triangular rivalry with Pakistan and China, and New Delhi's nonproliferation policy approaches. Yogesh Joshi and Frank O'Donnell show how India's nuclear trajectory has evolved in response to domestic, regional, and global drivers.

The authors argue that emerging trends in all three states are elevating risks of regional inadvertent and accidental escalation. These include the forthcoming launch of naval nuclear forces within an environment of contested maritime boundaries; the growing employment of dual-use delivery vehicles; and the emerging preferences of all three states to employ missiles early in a conflict. These dangers are amplified by the near-absence of substantive nuclear dialogue between these states, and the growing ambiguity of regional strategic intentions.

Based on primary-source research and interviews, this book will be important reading for scholars and students of nuclear deterrence and India's international relations, as well as for military, defense contractor, and policy audiences both within and outside South Asia.

Lecture Recommendation: June 16, 2025

Using the link provided you can request a copy of this book via Interlibrary Loan using your USNWC CAC or Blackboard credentials.


The significance of this study is that it establishes the fallacy of conventional perspectives on Indian nuclear deterrence-that the Indian nuclear programme entailed 'exclusively peaceful uses' during the Nehru era and the development of weapons capability was initiated by the government of Lal Bahadur Shastri after the first Chinese nuclear explosion in 1964. On the contrary, it provides incontrovertible documentary evidence that Dr Homi J. Bhabha formulated with Nehru's approval a nuclear weapons development strategy within the structural framework of the Indian civilian nuclear programme. Nehru was interested in a nuclear weapons capability for a 'deterrent in extremis'. The central premise of the study is that BJP government's decision to carry out the May 1998 nuclear tests was not an original one, but a step prefigured in a strategic continuum whose genesis dates back to the late 1950s. It suggests that the declaration of Indian nuclear deterrence after the May 1998 nuclear tests, the weaponization of Indian nuclear capability and the pronouncement of the Draft Nuclear Doctrine (DND) were not separate from earlier policies, but instead were part of that strategic continuum. The study analyses the dynamics of Indian nuclear deterrence, Indian nuclear doctrine and their implications for South Asian security. It is the first time that mostly primary archival, and documentary research material from diverse sources has been explored to write a book on this topic. It is more comprehensive than any other book on this subject in terms both of its timeframe (1947 until now) and of the issues covered-the evolution, development, dynamics and implications of Indian nuclear deterrence for South Asian Security. It is also the first book on the topic written from a Pakistani perspective.

Since the war began, the Hebrew press has lauded the Navy’s performance both in support of ground forces and in guarding its maritime claims such as offshore gas fields. Yet despite these accolades, the Navy stumbled in one of its most basic missions: protecting Israel from seaborne infiltration.

Lecture Recommendation 10 June 2025

Article mentioned during a Current Strategy Forum presentation.

China’s third aircraft carrier, Fujian returned from her sixth round of sea trials on 07 Jan 2025. While much has changed on her when compared to her predecessors insofar as aviation capabilities are concerned, her propulsion system is largely a replication of that on the Liaoning and Shandong, with possibly a few iterative improvements. There has been considerable speculation about the configuration of China’s next aircraft carrier, more so as no photographs of its construction have been posted by open sources as yet.

Lecture Recommendation 10 June 2025

Article referenced during a Current Strategy Forum presentation.

Meet the lab working to equip PLAN warships with vast amounts of electrical power.

China’s researchers recently claimed to have developed a working electromagnetic railgun, potentially providing the PLA with one of the most disruptive new weapons of the 21st century. Whether they actually have overcome the technical issues that long stymied U.S. work in this space remains to be seen, but it is clear that the PLA research investment in electromagnetic and power-generation systems goes back well over a decade.

Lecture Recommendation: June 10, 2025
Article was referenced during a presentation at the NWC Current Strategy Forum 2025.

A Chinese shipyard in Wuhan has launched a submarine which is likely to be the country's most advanced non-nuclear type. The new boat is larger than existing ones and is the first in the country to feature X-form rudders. There are indications that it may have a vertical launch system (VLS).

Lecture Recommendation: June 10, 2025
Article was referenced during a presentation at the NWC Current Strategy Forum (CSF) 2025.

China is building at least five new special purpose barges which appear tailor made for amphibious assault. The barges may provide the PRC (People's Republic of China) with a unique way to offload large numbers of tanks directly onto Taiwanese roads.

Lecture Recommendation: June 9, 2025
Recommended reading from the Current Strategy Forum June 9, 2025. You can login to the USNWC Library catalog with your CAC, if you are faculty, staff or student, or use your USNWC Blackboard credentials to request the book through Interlibrary Loan.

On 30 November 2001, Northrop Grumman Corporation (NOC) assumed control of Newport News Shipbuilding (NNS), bringing to an apparent conclusion a five-year building process of consolidation in the ownership of the six private-sector shipyards that build the Navy's major ships. Following NOC's acquisition of the NNS, the six yards are now owned by two firms-NOC, which owns three of the yards, and General Dynamics Corporation (GD), which owns the other three. The consolidation of these shipyards under two parent firms raises several issues, including potential saving results from consolidation, the potential impact on competition in Navy shipbuilding, the potential impact of shipyard employment levels, and the potential impact of the shipyards and shipbuilding of the political process.

Lecture Recommendation: June 9, 2025
Recommended reading from the Current Strategy Forum June 9, 2025.

Main Findings

Xi Jinping has played a direct and active role in China’s naval buildup. He is China’s first great navalist statesman, the world’s greatest navalist leader today, and among the world’s greatest navalist statesmen in modern history.
Notwithstanding major advances in ships, submarines, aircraft, and other hardware, Chinese military leaders believe that the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) continues to lag behind in human factors.
Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, the PLAN has dismissed (or is rumored to have dismissed) eleven flag officers. Beyond combating outright dysfunction, these removals are intended to prevent potential disloyalty and factionalism, centralize power, and further modernization and warfighting goals.
These high-profile dismissals have had no apparent impact on PLAN operational capabilities, which continue to improve at a remarkable rate. From the Taiwan Strait to the “distant oceans” (远洋), the service is present daily and visible internationally, particularly its surface fleet, indicating reliability, trust, and growing responsibilities and capabilities.
Since 2008, the PLAN’s surface fleet has almost doubled. Despite being projected to exceed 400 ships by the end of 2025, China’s Navy continues to successfully crew, operate, and train with them.

Lecture Recommendation: June 9, 2025
Recommended reading from the Current Strategy Forum June 9, 2025. You can login to the USNWC Library catalog with your CAC, if you are faculty, staff or student, or use your USNWC Blackboard credentials to request the book through Interlibrary Loan.

A provocative and urgent analysis of the U.S.-China rivalry. It has become conventional wisdom that America and China are running a "superpower marathon" that may last a century. Yet Hal Brands and Michael Beckley pose a counterintuitive question: What if the sharpest phase of that competition is more like a decade-long sprint? The Sino-American contest is driven by clashing geopolitical interests and a stark ideological dispute over whether authoritarianism or democracy will dominate the 21st century. But both history and China's current trajectory suggest that this rivalry will reach its moment of maximum danger in the 2020s. China is at a perilous moment: strong enough to violently challenge the existing order, yet losing confidence that time is on its side. Numerous examples from antiquity to the present show that rising powers become most aggressive when their fortunes fade, their difficulties multiply, and they realize they must achieve their ambitions now or miss the chance to do so forever. China has already started down this path. Witness its aggression toward Taiwan, its record-breaking military buildup, and its efforts to dominate the critical technologies that will shape the world's future. Over the long run, the Chinese challenge will most likely prove more manageable than many pessimists currently believe--but during the 2020s, the pace of Sino-American conflict will accelerate, and the prospect of war will be frighteningly real. America, Brands and Beckley argue, will still need a sustainable approach to winning a protracted global competition. But first, it needs a near-term strategy for navigating the danger zone ahead.

Lecture Recommendation: June 9, 2025
Recommended reading from the Current Strategy Forum June 9, 2025. You can login to the USNWC Library catalog with your CAC, if you are faculty, staff or student, or use your USNWC Blackboard credentials to access the book through the USNWC Library.

The United States and China are each actively pursuing development of a Blue Economy to promote greater marine, maritime, and naval capabilities through more innovative, sustainable and environmentally friendly means. This book examines China’s approach to developing a Blue Economy, compares China’s efforts to developments in the United States, analyses prospects for cooperation, and competition, and outlines strategic implications arising from China’s linkage of the Blue Economy development concept to its Maritime Silk Road initiative. An understanding of the Blue Economy as it is being pursued in China and the Indo-Pacific region is extremely relevant for academics, industry professionals, and government officials.

Lecture Recommendation: June 9, 2025
Recommended reading from the Current Strategy Forum June 9, 2025. You can login to the USNWC Library catalog with your CAC, if you are faculty, staff or student, or use your USNWC Blackboard credentials to access the book through the USNWC Library.

New details about the founding of China's Navy reveals critical historical context and insight into future strategy From 1949 to 1950, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) made crucial decisions to establish a navy and secure China's periphery. The civil war had been fought with a peasant army, yet in order to capture key offshore islands from the Nationalist rival, Mao Zedong needed to develop maritime capabilities. Mao's Army Goes to Sea is a ground-breaking history of the founding of the Chinese navy and Communist China's earliest island-seizing campaigns. In this definitive account of a little-known yet critical moment in China's naval history, Toshi Yoshihara shows that Chinese leaders refashioned the stratagems and tactics honed over decades of revolutionary struggle on land for nautical purposes. Despite significant challenges, the PLA ultimately scored important victories over its Nationalist foes as it captured offshore islands to secure its position. Drawing extensively from newly available Chinese-language sources, this book reveals how the navy-building process, sea battles, and contested offshore landings had a lasting influence on the PLA. Even today, the institution's identity, strategy, doctrine, and structure are conditioned by these early experiences and myths. Mao's Army Goes to Sea will help US policymakers and scholars place China's recent maritime achievements in proper historical context--and provide insight into how its navy may act in the future.

Lecture Recommendation: June 9, 2025
Recommended reading from the Current Strategy Forum June 9, 2025. You can login to the USNWC Library catalog with your CAC, if you are faculty, staff or student, or use your USNWC Blackboard credentials to request the book through Interlibrary Loan.

This book analyzes the rise of China's naval power and its possible strategic consequences from a wide variety of perspectives - technological, economic, and geostrategic - while employing a historical-comparative approach throughout. Since naval development requires huge financial resources and mostly takes place within the context of transnational industrial partnerships, this study also consciously adopts an industry perspective. The systemic problems involved in warship production and the associated material, financial, technological, and political requirements currently remain overlooked aspects in the case of China. Drawing on first-hand working experience in the naval shipbuilding industry, the author provides transparent criteria for the evaluation of different naval technologies' strategic value, which other researchers can draw upon as a basis for further research in such diverse fields as International Security Studies, Naval Warfare Studies, Chinese Studies, and International Relations.

Lecture Recommendation: June 9, 2025
Recommended reading from the Current Strategy Forum June 9, 2025. You can login to the USNWC Library catalog with your CAC, if you are faculty, staff or student, or use your USNWC Blackboard credentials to access the book through the USNWC Library.

Combining a close knowledge of Asia and an ability to tap Chinese-language sources with naval combat experience and expertise in sea-power theory, the authors assess how the rise of Chinese sea power will affect U.S. maritime strategy in Asia. They argue that China has laid the groundwork for a sustained challenge to American primacy in maritime Asia, and to defend this hypothesis they look back to Alfred Thayer Mahan's sea-power theories, now popular with the Chinese. The book considers how strategic thought about the sea shapes Beijing's deliberations and compares China's geostrategic predicament to that of the Kaiser's Germany a century ago. It examines the Chinese Navy's operational concepts, tactics, and capabilities and appraises China's missile force. The authors conclude that China now presents a challenge to America's strategic position of such magnitude that Washington must compete in earnest.

Lecture Recommendation: June 9, 2025
Recommended reading from the Current Strategy Forum June 9, 2025. You can login to the USNWC Library catalog with your CAC, if you are faculty, staff or student, or use your USNWC Blackboard credentials to request the book through Interlibrary Loan.


In February 1917, German U-boats launched a savage unrestricted campaign against both Allied and neutral shipping. At its peak in April, 860,000 tons of Allied merchant shipping was sunk. Britain's supremacy at sea was being severely challenged and with it the chances of victory in the wider war. Taking up the challenge was Britain's new First Sea Lord, Sir John Jellicoe, until the previous December C-in-C of the Britain's Grand Fleet - famously described by Churchill as the only man who could have lost the war in an afternoon. The battle he now faced was equally critical, although the timeline of defeat was a matter of months rather than hours. Britain's food stocks were dangerously low with wheat reserves down to six weeks and sugar to only two, while wide-scale shortages were crippling its industrial economy. Clearly, a radical new approach to anti-submarine warfare was called for, and Convoy became the leading contender. There were many objections to protecting shipping in this way, some ideological but most practical - a workable system, for example, effectively required state control of both shipping and distribution networks, something inconceivable in normal circumstances. However, Convoy had powerful advocates, including the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, who later claimed he had personally forced its adoption on a reluctant Admiralty. This self-serving political myth cast Jellicoe as an opponent of Convoy. Nothing could have been further from the truth. As both Jellicoe and Rear Admiral William Sims (USN) understood, the key requirement was a rapid increase in the number of destroyers for escort duties. America provided them, the first arriving in Queenstown, Ireland on 4 May and by June 46 were operating in European waters. This was the first step in an Anglo-American campaign that gradually brought the U-boat threat under control and led to its ultimate defeat.  Jellicoe's War: The U-boat Threat in World War One and the Question of Convoy is a fresh look at the undersea war as a whole and the complex factors bearing on the campaign, only one of which was Convoy. The result is a work of original analysis and thought provoking conclusions, abundantly illustrated with relevant maps, diagrams and photographs. A final seal of approval is the book's foreword written by former submariner, Admiral James "Jamie" Foggo, USN (Ret).  

Lecture Recommendation: June 9, 2025
Recommended reading from the Current Strategy Forum June 9, 2025. You can login to the USNWC Library catalog with your CAC, if you are faculty, staff or student, or use your USNWC Blackboard credentials to access the book through the USNWC Library.

A thrilling story of the Cold War, told by a former navy secretary on the basis of recently declassified documents. When Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981, the United States and NATO were losing the Cold War. The USSR had superiority in conventional weapons and manpower in Europe, and had embarked on a massive program to gain naval preeminence. But Reagan already had a plan to end the Cold War without armed conflict. Reagan led a bipartisan Congress to restore American command of the seas by building the navy back to six hundred major ships and fifteen aircraft carriers. He adopted a bold new strategy to deploy the growing fleet to northern waters around the periphery of the Soviet Union and demonstrate that the NATO fleet could sink Soviet submarines, defeat Soviet bomber and missile forces, and strike aggressively deep into the Soviet homeland if the USSR attacked NATO in Central Europe. New technology in radars, sensors, and electronic warfare made ghosts of American submarines and surface fleets. The United States proved that it could effectively operate carriers and aircraft in the ice and storms of Arctic waters, which no other navy had attempted. The Soviets, suffocated by this naval strategy, were forced to bankrupt their economy trying to keep pace. Shortly thereafter the Berlin Wall fell, and the USSR disbanded. In Oceans Ventured, John Lehman reveals for the first time the untold story of the naval operations that played a major role in winning the Cold War.

Lecture Recommendation: June 9, 2025
Recommended reading from the Current Strategy Forum June 9, 2025. You can login to the USNWC Library catalog with your CAC, if you are faculty, staff or student, or use your USNWC Blackboard credentials to access the book through the USNWC Library.

As U.S. strategy shifts (once again) to focus on great power competition, Strategy Shelved provides a valuable, analytic look back to the Cold War era by examining the rise and eventual fall of the U.S. Navy's naval strategy system from the post-World War II era to 1994. Steven T. Wills draws some important conclusions that have relevance to the ongoing strategic debates of today. His analysis focuses on the 1970s and 1980s as a period when U.S. Navy strategic thought was rebuilt after a period of stagnation during the Vietnam conflict and its high water mark in the form of the 1980s'maritime strategy and its attendant six hundred -ship navy force structure. He traces the collapse of this earlier system by identifying several contributing factors: the provisions of the Goldwater Nichols Act of 1986, the aftermath of the First Gulf War of 1991, the early 1990s revolution in military affairs, and the changes to the Chief of Naval Operations staff in 1992 following the end of the Cold War. All of these conditions served to undermine the existing naval strategy system. The Goldwater Nichols Act subordinated the Navy to joint control with disastrous effects on the long-serving cohort of uniformed naval strategists. The first Gulf War validated Army and Air Force warfare concepts developed in the Cold War but not those of the Navy's maritime strategy. The Navy executed its own revolution in military affairs during the Cold War through systems like AEGIS but did not get credit for those efforts. Finally, the changes in the Navy (OPNAV) staff in 1992 served to empower the budget arm of OPNAV at the expense of its strategists. These measures laid the groundwork for a thirty-year "strategy of means" where service budgets, a desire to preserve existing force structure, and lack of strategic vision hobbled not only the Navy, but also the Joint Force's ability to create meaningful strategy to counter a rising China and a revanchist Russian threat. Wills concludes his analysis with an assessment of the return of naval strategy documents in 2007 and 2015 and speculates on the potential for success of current Navy strategies including the latest tri-service maritime strategy. His research makes extensive use of primary sources, oral histories, and navy documents to tell the story of how the U.S. Navy created both successful strategies and how a dedicated group of naval officers were intimately involved in their creation. It also explains how the Navy's ability to create strategy, and even the process for training strategy writers, was seriously damaged in the post-Cold War era.

Lecture Recommendation: June 9, 2025
Recommended reading from the Current Strategy Forum June 9, 2025. You can login to the USNWC Library catalog with your CAC, if you are faculty, staff or student, or use your USNWC Blackboard credentials to access the book through the USNWC Library.

Winner of the 2024 Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature The Neptune Factor is the biography of an idea--the concept of "Sea Power," a term first coined by Capt. A.T. Mahan and the core thread of his life's work.  His central argument was that the outcome of rivalries on the seas have decisively shaped the course of modern history.  Although Mahan's scholarship has long been seen as foundational to all systematic study of naval power, Neptune Factor is the first attempt to explain how Mahan's definition of sea power shifted over time.    Far from presenting sea power in terms of combat, as often thought, Mahan conceptualized it in terms of economics.  Proceeding from the conviction that international trade carried across the world's oceans was the single greatest driver of national wealth (and thus power) in history, Mahan explained sea power in terms of regulating access to 'the common' and influencing the flows of trans-oceanic trade.  A nation possessing sea power could not only safeguard its own trade and that of its allies but might also endeavor to deny access to the common to its enemies and competitors.    A pioneering student of what is now referred to as the first era of globalization, lasting from the late nineteenth century until the First World War, Mahan also identified the growing dependence of national economies upon uninterrupted access to an interconnected global trading system.  Put simply, access to 'the common' was essential to the economic and political stability of advanced societies.  This growing dependence, Mahan thought, increased rather than decreased the potency of sea power.     Understanding the critical relationship between navies and international economics is not the only reason why Mahan's ideas remain--or rather have once again become--so important.  He wrote in, and of, a multi-polar world, when the reigning hegemon faced new challenges, and confusion and uncertainty reigned as the result of rapid technological change and profound social upheaval.  Mahan believed that the U.S. Navy owed the American people a compelling explanation of why it deserved their support--and their money.  His extensive, deeply informed, and highly sophisticated body of work on sea power constituted his attempt to supply such an explanation.   Mahan remains as relevant--and needed--today as he was more than a century ago. 

Lecture Recommendation: June 9, 2025
Recommended reading from the Current Strategy Forum June 9, 2025. You can login to the USNWC Library catalog with your CAC, if you are faculty, staff or student, or use your USNWC Blackboard credentials to request the book through Interlibrary Loan.

An eye-opening interpretation of the infamous Gallipoli campaign that sets it in the context of global trade.In early 1915, the British government ordered the Royal Navy to force a passage of the Dardanelles Straits - the most heavily defended waterway in the world. After the Navy failed to breach Turkish defenses, British and allied ground forces stormed the Gallipoli peninsula but were unable to move off the beaches. Over the course of the year, the Allied landed hundreds of thousands of reinforcements but all to no avail. The Gallipoli campaign has gone down as one of the great disasters in the history of warfare.Previous works have focused on the battles and sought to explain the reasons for the British failure, typically focusing on First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. In this bold new account, Nicholas Lambert offers the first fully researched explanation of why Prime Minister Henry Asquith and all of his senior advisers - the War Lords - ordered the attacks in the first place, in defiance of most professional military opinion. Peeling back the manipulation of the historical record by those involved with the campaign's inception, Lambert shows that the original goals were political-economic rather than military: not to relieve pressure on the Western Front but to respond to the fall-out from the massive disruption of the international grain trade caused by the war. By the beginning of 1915, the price of wheat was rising so fast that Britain, the greatest importer of wheat in the world, feared bread riots. Meanwhile Russia, the greatest exporter of wheat in the world and Britain's ally in the east, faced financial collapse. Lambert demonstrates that the War Lords authorized the attacks at the Dardanelles to open the straits to the flow of Russian wheat, seeking to lower the price of grain on the global market and simultaneously to eliminate the need for huge British loans to support Russia's war effort. Carefully reconstructing the perspectives of the individual War Lords, this book offers an eye-opening case study of strategic policy making under pressure in a globalized world economy.

Lecture Recommendation: June 9, 2025
Recommended reading from the Current Strategy Forum June 9, 2025. You can login to the USNWC Library catalog with your CAC, if you are faculty, staff or student, or use your USNWC Blackboard credentials to access the book through the USNWC Library.

The Road to Pearl Harbor offers a timely examination of the conflict in the Pacific prior to the attacks on Pearl Harbor and offers lessons applicable to understanding contemporary Great Power flash points between Asia and the West. This volume brings together renowned historians and analysts of grand strategy to map out the fateful decisions that culminated in war. The contributors take a pragmatic view of the policy and strategy options, as well as the decisions made by the leaders of the great powers. This important history underscores that the choices made by political, military, and naval leaders mattered in determining questions of war and peace. Highlighting Japan's war against China and the protracted resistance of Chiang-Kai-shek's Nationalist regime, The Road to Pearl Harbor provides historical context for understanding the struggle for mastery in Asia and decisions for war. The book also makes an important contribution to interwar naval history by examining the views of the Japanese Navy's leaders, who wanted to build up their navy to defeat Britain and the United States at sea. This history is certainly relevant, as the concluding chapter demonstrates in an eye-opening examination of the current views held by Chinese naval officers about how to fight a future war in the Pacific.

Lecture Recommendation: June 9, 2025
Recommended reading from the Current Strategy Forum June 9, 2025. You can login to the USNWC Library catalog with your CAC, if you are faculty, staff or student, or use your USNWC Blackboard credentials to request the book through Interlibrary Loan.

We often think of the modern era as the age of American power. In reality, we're living in a long, violent Eurasian century. That giant, resource-rich landmass possesses the bulk of the global population, industrial might, and potential military power; it touches all four of the great oceans. Eurasia is a strategic prize without equal--which is why the world has been roiled, reshaped, and nearly destroyed by clashes over the supercontinent. Since the early twentieth century, autocratic powers--from Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II to the Soviet Union--have aspired for dominance by seizing commanding positions in the world's strategic heartland. Offshore sea powers, namely the United Kingdom and America, have sought to make the world safe for democracy by keeping Eurasia in balance. America's rivalries with China, Russia, and Iran are the next round in this geopolitical game. If this new authoritarian axis succeeds in enacting a radically revised international order, America and other democracies will be vulnerable and insecure. Hal Brands, a renowned expert on global affairs, argues that a better understanding of Eurasia's strategic geography can illuminate the contours of rivalry and conflict in today's world. The Eurasian Century explains how revolutions in technology and warfare, and the rise of toxic ideologies of conquest, made Eurasia the center of twentieth-century geopolitics--with pressing implications for the struggles that will define the twenty-first.

Lecture Recommendation: June 9, 2025
Recommended reading from the Current Strategy Forum June 9, 2025. You can login to the USNWC Library catalog with your CAC, if you are faculty, staff or student, or use your USNWC Blackboard credentials to access the book through the USNWC Library.

This book makes a valuable and original contribution to the study of strategic thinking of one of the greatest naval theoreticians of all time. Rather than taking one of Mahan’s many works and reprinting it, this volume offers a unique collection of articles and chapters from many books by Mahan, selected to capture the whole range of his thinking. With these key selections, readers have a single, convenient reference to help them toward a full understanding of Mahan’s logic and thinking.

In Strategy: A History, Sir Lawrence Freedman, one of the world's leading authorities on war and international politics, captures the vast history of strategic thinking, in a consistently engaging and insightful account of how strategy came to pervade every aspect of our lives. The range of Freedman's narrative is extraordinary, moving from the surprisingly advanced strategy practiced in primate groups, to the opposing strategies of Achilles and Odysseus in The Iliad, the strategic advice of Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, the great military innovations of Baron Henri de Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz, the grounding of revolutionary strategy in class struggles by Marx, the insights into corporate strategy found in Peter Drucker and Alfred Sloan, and the contributions of the leading social scientists working on strategy today. The core issue at the heart of strategy, the author notes, is whether it is possible to manipulate and shape our environment rather than simply become the victim of forces beyond one's control. Time and again, Freedman demonstrates that the inherent unpredictability of this environment - subject to chance events, the efforts of opponents, the missteps of friends - provides strategy with its challenge and its drama. Armies or corporations or nations rarely move from one predictable state of affairs to another, but instead feel their way through a series of states, each one not quite what was anticipated, requiring a reappraisal of the original strategy, including its ultimate objective. Thus the picture of strategy that emerges in this book is one that is fluid and flexible, governed by the starting point, not the end point. A brilliant overview of the most prominent strategic theories in history, from David's use of deception against Goliath, to the modern use of game theory in economics, this masterful volume sums up a lifetime of reflection on strategy.

Lecture Recommendation: June 9, 2025
Recommended reading from the Current Strategy Forum June 9, 2025. You can login to the USNWC Library catalog with your CAC, if you are faculty, staff or student, or use your USNWC Blackboard credentials to access the book through the USNWC Library.

How and when do military innovations take place? Do they proceed differently during times of peace and times of war? In Winning the Next War, Stephen Peter Rosen argues that armies and navies are not forever doomed to "fight the last war." Rather, they are able to respond to shifts in the international strategic situation. He also discusses the changing relationship between the civilian innovator and the military bureaucrat. In peacetime, Rosen finds, innovation has been the product of analysis and the politics of military promotion, in a process that has slowly but successfully built military capabilities critical to American military success. In wartime, by contrast, innovation has been constrained by the fog of war and the urgency of combat needs. Rosen draws his principal evidence from U.S. military policy between 1905 and 1960, though he also discusses the British army's experience with the battle tank during World War I.

Lecture Recommendation: June 9, 2025
Recommended reading from the Current Strategy Forum June 9, 2025.

“Returning from Ebb Tide highlights the decline in our nation’s commercial maritime capability for a variety of reasons-the peace dividend in the post-Cold War era; elimination of subsidies for the commercial
maritime sector during the Ronald W. Reagan administration; and globalization whereby we outsourced our maritime lift requirements to foreign carriers, some of whom may not be friendly to us in times of war. It is one thing
to lament the inability of our current maritime industrial base to produce aircraft carriers, warships, icebreakers,
and submarines on time and on budget, yet policy makers and commentators often ignore the atrophy of our commercial maritime fleet. This is the fleet that supported the Allies to defeat authoritarian regimes in the First and
Second World Wars and ferried hundreds of thousands of troops and millions of pounds of equipment in support
of Desert Shield and Desert Storm. This fleet is a shadow of its former self, and this book represents a clarion call
to action. Failure to revitalize America’s once-great merchant fleet will spell sure defeat in the next time the United States finds itself fighting a major conflict. We cannot afford to idly observe the status quo in the commercial
maritime sector”— Provided by publisher

Lecture Recommendation: June 9, 2025
Recommended reading from the Current Strategy Forum June 9, 2025. You can login to the USNWC Library catalog with your CAC, if you are faculty, staff or student, or use your USNWC Blackboard credentials to access the book through the USNWC Library.

Why and how America's defense strategy must change in light of China's power and ambition--A Wall Street Journal best book of 2021   "This is a realist's book, laser-focused on China's bid for mastery in Asia as the 21st century's most important threat."--Ross Douthat, New York Times   "Colby's well-crafted and insightful Strategy of Denial provides a superb and, one suspects, essential departure point for an urgent and much-needed debate over U.S. defense strategy."--Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., Foreign Affairs   Elbridge A. Colby was the lead architect of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, the most significant revision of U.S. defense strategy in a generation. Here he lays out how America's defense must change to address China's growing power and ambition. Based firmly on the realist tradition but deeply engaged in current policy, this book offers a clear framework for what America's goals in confronting China must be, how its military strategy must change, and how it must prioritize these goals over its lesser interests.   The most informed and in-depth reappraisal of America's defense strategy in decades, this book outlines a rigorous but practical approach, showing how the United States can prepare to win a war with China that we cannot afford to lose--precisely in order to deter that war from happening.

Lecture Recommendation: June 9, 2025
Recommended reading from the Current Strategy Forum June 9, 2025. You can login to the USNWC Library catalog with your CAC, if you are faculty, staff or student, or use your USNWC Blackboard credentials to request the book through Interlibrary Loan.


Strategic A2/AD in Cyberspace focuses on exclusion from cyberspace, or the ability of a state to be cut off entirely from cyberspace. Strategic anti-access and area denial (A2/AD) operations are common in other domains, but, before now, they have not been examined for their relevance to cyberspace. This book examines how strategic A2/AD operations can cut off states from cyberspace through attacks at either the physical or logic layers of cyberspace. The result of strategic cyber A2/AD operations could be catastrophic for modern economies, governments, military forces, and societies, yet there has been surprisingly little study of these threats to states' access to cyberspace. This book examines the implications of strategic cyber A2/AD operations for deterrence strategy and proposes a new view of how exclusion from cyberspace can be used as a coercive tool in diplomacy.

Lecture Recommendation: June 9, 2025
Recommended reading from the Current Strategy Forum June 9, 2025. You can login to the USNWC Library catalog with your CAC, if you are faculty, staff or student, or use your USNWC Blackboard credentials to request the book through Interlibrary Loan.

In Autocracy 2.0, Jennifer Lind reveals how China's leaders defied expectations and propelled the country to innovation superpower status--and what that means for the balance of power and global struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. In 2008, the world watched in awe as 2,008 men pounded fou drums in unison at the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony--a spectacle that heralded China's arrival as a global powerhouse. Yet even as China's economy skyrocketed, skeptics scoffed at its ability to lead in tech, arguing that its authoritarian institutions smother true innovation. Jennifer Lind dismantles this assumption, showing that China hasn't just kept pace--it has, in fact, surged ahead. Coupling hard data with razor-sharp analysis, Lind shows that China's ascent was fueled by what she calls "smart authoritarianism": a model of governance in which autocratic leaders temper tight political control with inclusive economic measures. By balancing pro-innovation policies with tools of repression, China's leaders have obtained political control and economic growth. These smart authoritarians, Lind observes, aren't the brass-knuckled dictators of the past, they're their polished, Savile Row-clad progeny--and they are found not only in China, but in authoritarian regimes worldwide. Compelling and incisive, Autocracy 2.0 is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand China's meteoric rise and how today's autocrats are reshaping the technological frontier, governance, and the global balance of power.

What if the fate of a young nation hinged not on a grand fleet at sea or a sweeping land campaign but on a handful of warships anchored in a narrow lake? In September 1814 on the waters of Lake Champlain, American sailors won an improbable victory that not only turned back the largest British invasion force of the War of 1812 but also helped secure peace and preserve the young union.

Subjects: War of 1812, Military History, U.S. Navy, British Navy

Oceanic strife is no longer solely an affair for great powers. It’s no longer even just for states.
This week a friend asked whether drugrunners could damage U.S. Navy littoral combat ships (LCS) policing southern waters. My answer: absolutely. Littoral combat ships are not heavily armored ships of war. They are fragile—taking Winston Churchill’s quip about eggshells armed with hammers to extremes. Wisely or not, the U.S. Navy leadership designated speed as a key attribute of the LCS, compelling shipwrights to sacrifice rugged construction to save on weight. In fact, one LCS subclass, the Independence-class trimaran, has an all-aluminum hull with a history of hull cracking—and that’s during routine conditions. The steel-hulled Freedom-class monohull, which has logged most of the navy’s Caribbean counternarcotics missions, is scarcely more stoutly built.

Subjects: U.S. Navy, Houthi, Navy Vessels,

After China began shelling a nearby island, a four-pronged U.S. response led to decades of cross-strait peace.

As China applies increasing military pressure against Taiwan, it’s worth considering an earlier era when conditions were much worse. In the fall of 1958, four countries—United States, Soviet Union, People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan)—found themselves on the brink of nuclear war. The incident, which would later be known as the second Taiwan Strait Crisis, led to a rupture in Sino-Soviet relations and altered the trajectory of the Cold War. Revisiting it reminds us of an element of deterrence that is getting short shrift today.

All policies, strategies, and operational plans are informed by a wide array of theories, whether in the form of sophisticated empirical investigations or assumptions based on limited evidence. Military officers who develop (or who advise those who develop) policies and strategies will constantly engage in theorization during the course of their duties. Despite this, they are not guaranteed to receive an educational grounding in theoretical assessment during their time in professional military education (PME). Being alert to the methodological issues that can arise during the course of military taskings can be a huge asset to an officer. This article offers guidance for military officers engaged in these tasks at an educational level that could be useful for both the intermediate and senior ranks of officers engaged in PME. The author explains why it is useful to employ a broad but accepted definition of the term theory to encompass concepts and assumptions based on limited evidence. This article explores the understated importance of theories, and it offers a framework for assessing the theoretical foundations of policy options. There are three primary opportunities to analyze theories and potentially detect errors in theoretical reasoning: by clearly stating each theory and its causal element, by exploring what evidence supports or disconfirms the theory, and by inquiring what competing theories could discredit the theoretical conclusions that support the policy option under consideration. While this article certainly does not present a perfect method for preventing errors, alertness to these three semisequential opportunities can prevent costly policy mistakes. All militaries would be well served if PME institutions offered students a more thorough grounding in these matters. This article offers guidance for officers engaged in these tasks and for PME faculty seeking to bring elements of theoretical analysis into their curricula.

Subjects: Professional Military Education, PME, critical thinking

While most Americans are aware of the debate over a security-for-resources deal with Ukraine, far fewer know of a similar proposal that has quietly emerged in the heart of Africa.

Subjects: Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC, Rwanda, Declaration of Principles

The actionable finding from that disgraceful episode is this: never dissemble, even to defend a venerable institution.
Some unsolicited advice for leaders of large bureaucratic institutions: always be forthright, even—no, especially—in times of trouble. People instantly see through dissembling. It’s self-defeating.

Lecture Recommendation: April 21, 2025

USNWC chapter Authors:
John Hattendorf : "The 1st Anglo-Dutch War, 1652-1654, How an unexpected enemy with innovative Tactics started an arms race with long-term strategic consequences" (Ch. 1)
Kevin McCranie "Theory Meets Reality of War: Julian S. Corbett, his theories, and the first world war" (Ch. 4)
John Maurer "Contesting the German Island Chain: Winston Churchill and the search for a naval offensive during the first world war." (Ch. 5)
Andrew S. Erickson, "Adversaries and Planning Assumptions: China's Navy and the post-cold war world". (Ch. 14)

How have navies contemplated possible enemies? How did they learn, or fail to learn, once operations began? How does this analysis inform today's planning for future conflict? These questions guide the noted historians and naval strategists who contributed to Planning for War at Sea. A central theme is the regular failure of navies' best-laid plans. Covering four centuries of naval warfare, the chapters illustrate the challenges all navies faced when considering possible enemies. Even during the Age of Sail, ships were among the most expensive and long-term national endeavors. Navies therefore planned well in advance for future wars, usually without knowing their adversaries or how they would fight them at sea. Building a capable navy requires sustained investment in naval infrastructure long before the fighting starts.   In the final chapters naval strategists expand on this historical analysis to address how effectively or ineffectively today's three leading navies--Russia, China, and the United States--have configured themselves during the post-Cold War era in preparing for future great power conflict. This collection is an important work for strategists, scholars, and policymakers.

The Defense Department’s 2023 National Defense Industrial Strategy (NDIS) prioritizes resilient supply chains, including those for critical minerals. Mineral consumption directed by the DoD will likely increase as efforts to build more naval vessels, munitions, and uncrewed aerial vehicles continue. However, limited U.S. mining and refining production capacity has led to heavy reliance on imports, particularly from China, to meet demand. The 2024 NDIS Implementation Plan recommends stockpiling and investment in mineral projects. This report proposes a new approach for securing critical mineral supply chains: materiel-for-minerals, or M4M deals.

Subjects: Geo-Economics, Strategic Technology, Supply chains

The U.S. Navy can learn much from the Russo-Japanese War—and from dueling interpretations of that conflict by naval theorists Alfred Thayer Mahan and Julian S. Corbett.

Lecture Recommendation: April 3, 2025

Wife of self-proclaimed North Pole discoverer Robert Edwin Peary, Josephine Peary was the first woman apart from the Inuit to take part in an Arctic expedition. My Arctic Journal, unavailable for nearly a century, is Peary's memoir of the time she spent, from June of 1891 to August of 1892, accompanying her husband and his exploration party across the northernmost expanses of Greenland

Lecture Recommendation: April 3, 2025

As climate change accelerates, the Arctic has become a frontline of global competition. Melting ice, rising temperatures, and swelling seas have made remote regions at once newly accessible and rife with new dangers. Vladimir Putin's Russia has embarked on a substantial military buildup in the Arctic, and China has also turned its attention northward. The United States, however, has only recently begun to reestablish its Arctic presence after many years of waning influence. America in the Arctic offers a timely and compelling case for why the United States must deepen its commitment to a region threatened by climate change and geopolitical rivalry. Mary Thompson-Jones surveys past and present U.S. relations with the Arctic lands: Canada, Iceland, Greenland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia. She traces the history of the U.S. presence in the far north from the purchase of Alaska through the Cold War, arguing that lessons from the past should inform America's relationships with its Arctic neighbors today. At its best, U.S. Arctic policy balanced security interests with residents' needs and international cooperation on environmental and regional issues. In recent years, many policymakers scrambling to reassert U.S. leadership have framed their goals solely in security terms. Thompson-Jones argues that climate change now poses the greatest challenge, calling for a new approach that is inclusive of all the Arctic's inhabitants. Bringing together national security expertise and historical insight, this book charts a course for American Arctic policy in a warming world.

Lecture Recommendation: March 25, 2025

In 2014, Russia illegally annexed Crimea, bolstered a separatist conflict in the Donbas region, and attacked Ukraine with its regular army and special forces. In each instance of Russian aggression, the U.S. response has often been criticized as inadequate, insufficient, or hesitant. The Moscow Factor: U.S. Policy toward Sovereign Ukraine and the Kremlin is a unique study that examines four key Ukraine-related policy decisions across two Republican and two Democratic U.S. administrations. Eugene M. Fishel asks whether, how, and under what circumstances Washington has considered Ukraine's status as a sovereign nation in its decisionmaking regarding relations with Moscow. This study situates the stance of the United States toward Ukraine in the broader context of international relations. It fills an important lacuna in existing scholarship and policy discourse by focusing on the complex trilateral-rather than simply bilateral-dynamics between the United States, Ukraine, and Russia from 1991 to 2016. This book brings together for the first time documentary evidence and declassified materials dealing with policy deliberation, retrospective articles authored by former policymakers, and formal memoirs by erstwhile senior officials. The study is also supplemented by open-ended interviews with former and returning officials.

Russia’s use of quasi-private military companies, most notably the Wagner Group and its successor, the Africa Corps, has bolstered undemocratic regimes while expanding Russian influence in the Sahel. However, these groups have done little to improve regional security. This article argues that the United States has a strategic opportunity to counter Russian influence by pairing immediate humanitarian assistance with long-term investments in social, economic, and political development. Such an approach is essential not only for addressing the region’s urgent security needs but also for laying the groundwork for sustainable stability.

Subjects: Russia, Wagner Group, Africa Corps, Private Military Groups

Lecture Recommendation: March 24, 2025

A new and provocative take on the formerly classified history of accelerating superpower military competition in space in the late Cold War and beyond. In March 1983, President Ronald Reagan shocked the world when he established the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), derisively known as "Star Wars," a space-based missile defense program that aimed to protect the US from nuclear attack. In Weapons in Space, Aaron Bateman draws from recently declassified American, European, and Soviet documents to give an insightful account of SDI, situating it within a new phase in the militarization of space after the superpower détente fell apart in the 1970s. In doing so, Bateman reveals the largely secret role of military space technologies in late-Cold War US defense strategy and foreign relations. In contrast to existing narratives, Weapons in Space shows how tension over the role of military space technologies in American statecraft was a central source of SDI's controversy, even more so than questions of technical feasibility. By detailing the participation of Western European countries in SDI research and development, Bateman reframes space militarization in the 1970s and 1980s as an international phenomenon. He further reveals that even though SDI did not come to fruition, it obstructed diplomatic efforts to create new arms control limits in space. Consequently, Weapons in Space carries the legacy of SDI into the post-Cold War era and shows how this controversial program continues to shape the global discourse about instability in space--and the growing anxieties about a twenty-first-century space arms race.

The concept of maritime security is evolving due to a myriad of challenges and opportunities emerging in the 21st century. If the United States is to remain the world’s premier seapower and able to counter Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s efforts to reconceive maritime security in ways that favor the People’s Republic of China over U.S. and allied interests, then greater strategic attention is needed to define what constitutes maritime security for the remainder of this century and to develop modern-day maritime statecraft to support this conception.

Subjects: China, Xi Jinping, U.S. Foreign Relations, PRC

Lecture Recommendation: 18 February 2025

Scholar Kennedy gives a thorough history of the United Nations that explains the institution's roots and functions while also casting an eye on the UN's effectiveness as a body and on its prospects for success in meeting coming challenges. He makes sense of the commissions and committees, and how the six main operating bodies operate and interact. Citing examples from history, he shows how the five permanent members of the Security Council on numerous occasions overcame political antagonisms to spearhead military supervision of aid in humanitarian crises, and how lack of cooperation among the great powers has hamstrung such initiatives as the control of greenhouse gas emissions and exacerbated the deleterious effects of globalization on developing nations' economies. As a body, the UN emerges here for what it is: fallible, human-based, oftentimes dependent on the whims of powerful nations or the foibles of individual senior administrators, but utterly indispensable.--From publisher description.

Lecture Recommendation: 18 February 2025

Richard Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations, an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher. Until June 2003, Richard Haass was director of policy planning for the Department of State, where he was a principal advisor to Secretary of State Colin Powell.Previously, Haass was vice president and director of foreign policy studies at The Brookings Institution.  He was also special assistant to President George Bush and senior director on the staff of the National Security Council from 1989 to1993.  Haass is the author ofThe Opportunity: America 's Moment to Alter History's Course. A Rhodes Scholar, he holds a B.A. from Oberlin College and Master and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from Oxford University .

Institutional strategy in a post-information age cannot solely focus on platform development and employment but rather must emphasize ensuring a force has the right connections to operate and rapidly adapt to a flat and transparent operating environment. The three dimensions of interoperability outlined in Allied and Joint doctrine, technical, procedural, and human, provide a framework for force and concept developers to follow ensuring a modern force is connected and adaptable enough to meet the unforeseen demands of tomorrow’s conflicts.

The composition of the armed forces is, by now, well established as a major factor determining the risk of coups d’état. However, military discontent not only manifests in the form of coups but also as mutinies. This latter form of troop rebellion has received little empirical attention.

Lecture Recommendation: February 12, 2025

Recommended reading by German Navy Rear Admiral Henning Faltin

Why and how America's defense strategy must change in light of China's power and ambition--A Wall Street Journal best book of 2021   "This is a realist's book, laser-focused on China's bid for mastery in Asia as the 21st century's most important threat."--Ross Douthat, New York Times   "Colby's well-crafted and insightful Strategy of Denial provides a superb and, one suspects, essential departure point for an urgent and much-needed debate over U.S. defense strategy."--Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., Foreign Affairs   Elbridge A. Colby was the lead architect of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, the most significant revision of U.S. defense strategy in a generation. Here he lays out how America's defense must change to address China's growing power and ambition. Based firmly on the realist tradition but deeply engaged in current policy, this book offers a clear framework for what America's goals in confronting China must be, how its military strategy must change, and how it must prioritize these goals over its lesser interests.   The most informed and in-depth reappraisal of America's defense strategy in decades, this book outlines a rigorous but practical approach, showing how the United States can prepare to win a war with China that we cannot afford to lose--precisely in order to deter that war from happening.

The Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army are unquestionably guilty of self-defeating behavior. But American military planners should not push their positive assessment too far.

Subjects: China, Chinese Communist Part, CCP, Military Strategy

The flight of Bashar al-Assad to Moscow has brought to a close Vladimir Putin’s second attempt to secure Russia’s position as one of the major powers of the global system. The pressures of maintaining the “special military operation” in Ukraine and the political and generational transitions now underway in Russia are inexorably generating the conditions that will usher in a new and distinct post-Putin Russian approach to international relations.

Subjects: Russia, Economics, Foreign Policy, U.S.-Russia relations,

International Security, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Spring 2020), Pp. 84-118
Lecture recommendation: February 3, 2025

Many strategists argue that to deter a nuclear attack, states must be certain of their ability to retaliate after a nuclear first strike. China's nuclear posture of uncertain retaliation suggests an alternative logic. A simplified nuclear exchange model developed to evaluate China's nuclear retaliatory capabilities against the Soviet Union in 1984 and the United States in 2000 and 2010 shows that China's nuclear retaliatory capability has been and remains far from assured. This study suggests that China’s criterion for effective nuclear deterrence is very low.

Subjects: China, Nuclear, Nuclear Survivability, China Nuclear Program

The White House should appoint some senior overseer, probably housed within the National Security Council, with the authority to manage all U.S. government endeavors relating to maritime strategy.

Subjects: White House, Maritime Strategy, National Security Council

The United States needs a true, comprehensive maritime strategy. It takes the form of an interconnected effort that recognizes that seapower does not flow from naval power alone and the conditions under which the U.S. developed into a great maritime power have shifted. Readjustment is necessary.

Subjects: Maritime Strategy, Naval Power, Shipbuilding

The new administration must urgently focus its efforts on strengthening the U.S. military’s combat credibility in the Western Pacific through investments in capabilities that enable at-sea and distributed logistics. To deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from aggression against Taiwan, the U.S. military must demonstrate it can effectively sustain combat at great distances and across a distributed force.

Subjects: U.S. Military, Western Pacific, PRC, China, Taiwan

Russia’s intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) force faces significant development and programmatic challenges. A test launch failure of Russia’s newest and most capable ICBM, the RS-28, also known as the Sarmat, in September of last year highlights numerous issues with Russian ICBM modernization. However, Moscow’s nuclear deterrent capability remains formidable and ICBMs are of particular importance to their nuclear force.

Subjects: Russia, ICBM, Nuclear Deterrence

This report identifies trends at the nexus of child recruitment and operational behavior across VNSAs that use terrorism. It draws upon available cross-national data on child soldier recruitment to map trends in operational activities before exploring child recruitment by two VNSAs in Africa: Al-Shabaab in Somalia and Boko Haram in Nigeria.

Subjects: Terrorism, Terrorist Organizations,Recruitment

Lecture Recommendation: January 21, 2025

*Major New York Times Bestseller *More than 2.6 million copies sold *One of The New York Times Book Review's ten best books of the year *Selected by The Wall Street Journal as one of the best nonfiction books of the year *Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient *Daniel Kahneman's work with Amos Tversky is the subject of Michael Lewis's best-selling The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation--each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives--and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Topping bestseller lists for almost ten years, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a contemporary classic, an essential book that has changed the lives of millions of readers.

Lecture Recommendation: January 21, 2025

A brilliant and visionary argument for America's role as an enforcer of peace and order throughout the world-and what is likely to happen if we withdraw and focus our attention inward. Recent years have brought deeply disturbing developments around the globe. American sentiment seems to be leaning increasingly toward withdrawal in the face of such disarray. In this powerful, urgent essay, Robert Kagan elucidates the reasons why American withdrawal would be the worst possible response, based as it is on a fundamental and dangerous misreading of the world. Like a jungle that keeps growing back after being cut down, the world has always been full of dangerous actors who, left unchecked, possess the desire and ability to make things worse. Kagan makes clear how the "realist" impulse to recognize our limitations and focus on our failures misunderstands the essential role America has played for decades in keeping the world's worst instability in check. A true realism, he argues, is based on the understanding that the historical norm has always been toward chaos-that the jungle will grow back, if we let it.

Lecture Recommendation January 13, 2025

A comprehensive analysis that thrusts Jervis into the front ranks of nuclear essayists Kirkus Reviews Robert Jervis argues here that the possibility of nuclear war has created a revolution in military strategy and international relations. He examines how the potential for nuclear Armageddon has changed the meaning of war, the psychology of statesmanship, and the formulation of military policy by the superpowers.

The year 2027 is just a year. We should remain watchful as it approaches, lest the prophets of automatic warfare prove correct, but we should neither relax our guard in the meantime nor resign ourselves to a certain clash of arms.

Subjects: China, Taiwan, China War, Xi Jinping

Lecture Recommendation: January 6, 2025

This study examines nuclear dynamics in a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, a war that the authors hope will never occur. What creates the greatest pressure for nuclear weapons use in such a conflict? What happens if nuclear weapons are used? To answer these questions, the CSIS-MIT team modified its existing U.S.-China wargame to include nuclear weapons and ran it 15 times.

The greatest pressure for nuclear use came when China teams reached a crisis: their invasion was in danger of a defeat that might threaten Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule. To dissuade China from gambling for resurrection—using nuclear weapons to salvage a failing conventional campaign—U.S. diplomacy was much more important than nuclear brinksmanship. Favorable outcomes were possible, but total victory was unachievable. The United States must therefore be prepared to successfully prosecute a high-end conventional war while at the same time providing face saving off-ramps to the adversary. To do otherwise risks a nuclear holocaust, as indeed occurred in three game iterations.

Lecture Recommendation: January 06, 2025

Nuclear deterrence rests on the survivability of nuclear arsenals. For much of the nuclear age, “counterforce” disarming attacks—those aimed at eliminating an opponent's nuclear forces—were nearly impossible because of the ability of potential victims to hide and protect their weapons. Technological developments, however, are eroding this foundation of nuclear deterrence. Advances rooted in the computer revolution have made nuclear forces around the world considerably more vulnerable. Specifically, two key approaches that countries have relied on to ensure arsenal survivability since the dawn of the nuclear age—hardening and concealment—have been undercut by leaps in weapons accuracy and a revolution in remote sensing. Various methods, evidence, and models demonstrate the emergence of new possibilities for counterforce disarming strikes. In short, the task of securing nuclear arsenals against attack is far more difficult than it was in the past. The new era of counterforce challenges the basis for confidence in contemporary deterrence stability, raises critical issues for national and international security policy, and sheds light on one of the enduring theoretical puzzles of the nuclear era: why international security competition has endured in the shadow of the nuclear revolution.

As U.S. President Joe Biden’s national security team prepares to depart, one of its chief foreign policy strategies is facing withering assault. A growing chorus of critics argues that Ukraine’s current dire situation is partly the result of Biden’s timid approach to helping Kyiv defend itself against Russia’s invasion.

Subjects: Ukraine, Russia, Putin, Biden administration foreign policy

This associated link will connect you to "Taking Back the Seas : Transforming the U.S. Surface Fleet for Decision--Centric Warfare.

Dr. James Holmes occupies the J.C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College. Many of his books, including " A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy" (2019), "Red Star Over the Pacific : China's Rise and Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy" (second edition, 2018), and "Defending the Strait : Taiwan's Naval Strategy in the 21st Century" (2011) are in the Henry Eccles Library. This link will deliver you to "Is China Planning to Incite a 'People's War' to Dominate the South China Sea?"

Dr. Sam Tangredi, Captain, (U.S. Navy, Retired), published this article in "Proceedings." This link will transport you to "Decommission Fleet Forces Command." Dr. Tangredi's "Anti--Access Warfare : Countering A2/AD Strategies" (2013) is in the Henry Eccles Library and his critical analyses of "The Senkaku Paradox : Risking Great Power War Over Small Stakes" is in the Book Review Section of the Reading Room.

This commentary by Dr. James Holmes, who is the Inaugural J.C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College, may be accessed by following the associated link. Dr. Holmes's most recent publication is "A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy." Moreover, Dr. Holmes's "The Ultimate Way to Deter China : Why Island Chain Defense Can Work" is in the Reading Room.

Dr. Pauline M. Shanks Kaurin, Professor in the College of Leadership and Ethics at the Naval War College and Dr. Bradley Strawser of the Naval Postgraduate School, published this article in "War on the Rocks." This link will deliver you to "Disgraceful Pardons : Dishonoring the Honorable." Dr. Pauline M. Shanks Kaurin's "The Warrior, Military Ethics and Contemporary Warfare : Achilles Goes Asymmetrical" (2014) resides in the Henry Eccles Library of the Naval War College.

This article by Professor James Holmes of the Strategy and Policy Department at the Naval War College may be accessed by following the link or image. Dr. Holmes is the author of "A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy" (2018).A Revised second edition of Dr. Holmes and Dr. Yoshihara's "Red Star Over the Pacific : China's Rise and Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy" is available in the Learning Commons of the Naval War College.

"The War in the Ukraine Must End" by Dr. Lyle J. Goldstein, who is the Founding Director or the China Maritime Studies Institute at the Naval War College, may be retrieved by following the link or image. Dr. Goldstein's "Europe Is Stuck Between the United States and Russia" is also in the Reading Room. Dr. Goldstein's "Not Congruent but Quite Complementary : U.S.and Chinese Approaches to Nontraditional Security" (2012) is available in the Henry Eccles Library of the Naval War College.

This link will deliver you to Dr. Rebecca Friedman Lissner's "The Long Shadow of the Gulf War." Dr. Lissner's "What Is Grand Strategy : Sweeping a Conceptual Minefield" is in the Reading Room. Moreover, Dr. Lissner is also a member of the Institute for Future Warfare Studies at the Naval War College.

This critical analysis by Dr. Jessica Blankshain may be retrieved by following the link or image. "Decision-making in American Foreign Policy : Translating Theory into Practice" (2019) by Dr. Blankshain, Dr. David Cooper and Dr. Nikolas K. Gvosdev is available in the Henry Eccles Library of the Naval War College.

This article by Dr. Andrew S. Erickson, who is Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., may br accessed by following the link or image. Dr. Erickson and Professor Ryan D. Martinson's "China's Maritime Gray Zone Operations," which was published on March 15, 2019, is available in the Henry Eccles Library of the Naval War College.

This article by Dr. Mackubin Owens, former Professor at the Naval War College, may be accessed by following the associated link or image. Dr. Owens's "US Civil--Military Relations After 9/11 : Renegotiating the Civil Military Bargain" (2011) is in the Henry Eccles Library of the Naval War College.

Dr. Lyle J. Goldstein, who is an Affiliate in the Russia Maritime Studies Institute of the Naval War College as well, published this article in "The National Interest." This link will deliver you to "American Submarines Are in the Crosshairs of China." Dr. Goldstein's "China Nuclear Force Modernization" is in the Henry Eccles Library of the Naval War College.

Dr. Holmes occupies the Inaugural J.C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College. This link will convey you to "Its Time for a Massive U.S. Navy Base in Australia." Dr. Holmes's "A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy" will be available on December 1st.

This article by Dr. Lyle J. Goldstein may be retrieved by following either the attendant link or associated image.
Dr. Goldstein's "China Is Learning From Russian Military Interactions with the United States" is in the Reading Room.

Dr. James Holmes, who is Professor of Strategy and Policy at the U.S. Naval War College, published this commentary on the Battle of Midway in "The National Interest." This link will deliver you to "'The Most Complete Naval Victory' : How America Smashed Japan at Midway." Dr. Holmes's forthcoming publication is "A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy." The Henry Eccles Library has "Shattered Sword : The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway" (2005) by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully in its Collection.

Dr. Lyle J. Goldstein, who is not only Research Professor in the Strategic and Operational Research Department but also an Affiliate in the Russia Maritime Studies Institute at the Naval War College, published this article in "The National Interest." This link will convey you to "Should China Police the Strait of Hormuz?" Dr. Goldstein's "Five Dragons Stirring Up the Sea : Challenge and Opportunity in China's Improving Maritime Enforcement Capabilities" (2010) is in the Henry Eccles Library and "China Is Learning from Russian Military Interactions with the United States" is in the Reading Room.

Dr. Rebecca Pincus published this article about the Arctic in "War on the Rocks." This link will connect you to "NATO North? Building a Role for NATO in the Arctic" Dr. Pincus's "Diplomacy on Ice : Energy and Environment in the Arctic and Antarctica" (2015) is in the Henry Eccles Library of the Naval War College.

This interview with Dr. Lindsay Cohn may be retrieved by following the associated link or image. Dr. Cohn's "Markets and Manpower : The Political Economy of Compulsory Military Service" is in the Henry Eccles Library of the Naval War College and "What Discord Follows : The Divisive Debate Over Military Disobedience" is in the Reading Room.

Dr. Tom Nichols, who is Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College, published this article in "The National Interest." This link will convey you to his writing on the Cold War. Dr. Nichols's "Eve of Destruction : the Coming Age of Preventive War (2008) and "No Use : Nuclear Weapons and U.S. National Security (first edition, 2014)" are available in the Henry Eccles Library of the Naval War College.

This link will transport you to Dr. James Holmes's "A Zombie Fighter's Guide to Strategy." Dr. Holmes delivered the Issues in National Security Lecture : U.S. Naval Strategy in the Pacific at the War College on February 5th. The Learning Commons contains Dr. Holmes's "Defending the Strait : Taiwan's Naval Strategy in the 21st Century" (2011) and Max Brooks's "World War Z " An Oral History of the Zombie War" (first edition, 2006) in the Collection.

Dr. Lyle J. Goldstein, who remains an affiliate in the Russia Maritime Studies Institute at the Naval War College, posted this article in "The National Interest." This link will transport you to "One War Still Haunts the Chinese Military to This Day." Dr. Goldstein's "China's Nuclear Force Modernization" (2005) and "Five Dragons Stirring Up the Sea : Challenge and Opportunity in China's Improving Maritime Enforcement Capabilities" (2010) are available in the Henry Eccles Library.

Dr. Andrew Erickson, who is Professor of Strategy and Policy at the Naval War College, published this article in "War on the Rocks." This link will deliver you to "Make China Great Again : Xi's Truly Grand Strategy." Dr. Erickson's "Good Riddance to the INF Treaty" and "China's Defense White Paper Means Only One Thing : Trouble Ahead" are in the Reading Room" while his "China's Maritime Gray Zone Operations" (2019) is available in the Henry Eccles Library of the Naval War College.

This critique by Dr. Lyle J. Goldstein, which appeared in "The National Interest," may be accessed by following the link or image. Dr. Goldstein's "Meeting China Halfway : How to Defuse the Emerging US--China Rivalry"(2015) and "Five Dragons Stirring Up the Sea : Challenge and Opportunity in China's Improving Maritime Enforcement Capabilities"(2010) are in the Learning Commons of the Naval War College.

Dr. James Holmes, who delivered Issues in National Security Lecture 3 : U.S. Naval Power in the Pacific on February 5, 2019, also published this commentary in "The National Interest." This link will connect you to "Let's Send the U.S. Navy's 'Stealthy' Destroyer Back in Time to Fight a World War II Battle." Dr. Holmes's "Alternative History : If Theodore Roosevelt Had Lived..." and "The Evolution of the U.S. Navy" are in the Reading Room.

This link will connect you to "How to Stop China in the South China Sea : Maritime Counterinsurgency." He is also the author of "This Is How You Defeat China's Island--Building in the South China Sea" which was also published in "The National Interest."

Dr. James Holmes, whose "Chinese Naval Strategy in the 21st Century : the Turn to Mahan" (2008) is available in the Learning Commons of the Naval War College, published this article in "The National Interest." This link will deliver you to "America Smashed Imperial Japan's Navy at Leyte Gulf : What Lessons Can China Learn?" Dr. Holmes's "Don't Believe China's Commitment to Peace and Stability" is also in the Reading Room.

This article by Dr. James Holmes may be retrieved vi following the link or image to "The National Interest." The Learning Commons of the Naval War College contains "The National Interest." in its holdings. Dr. Holmes's "Enough Nuclear : All of the Reasons the U.S. Navy Needs Diesel Submarines" is in the Reading Room while his forthcoming book is "A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy."

Dr. James Holmes, who is Professor of Strategy and Policy at the United States Naval War College, published this critique on Taiwan in "Foreign Policy." This link will connect you to "Taiwan Needs a Maoist Military." Dr. Holmes's "Defending the Strait : Taiwan's Naval Strategy in the 21st Century" (2011) is in the Learning Commons of the Naval War College.

Lecture: October 16, 2019
Dr. Charles Freilich, who will deliver the Lecture of Opportunity on October 16, 2019 at the Naval War College, published this article in "Survival : Global Politics and Strategy." This link will connect you to the Learning Commons of the Naval War College and Dr. Freilich's "Can Israel Survive Without America?" The subject of Dr. Freilich's lecture is Israeli National Security : Challenges and Opportunities in an Era of Change. Dr. Freilich's "Realism and Messianism : National Security Decision Making in Israel" (1992) is in the Henry Eccles Library of the Naval War College.

Lecture: October 15, 2019
Dr. David Simon, who will be attending the Second Annual Genocide Conference at the Naval War College on October 15, 2019, published this article on the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. This link will deliver you to "Unhappy Anniversary : Lessons Unlearned from a Tragic Retreat 25 Years Ago." Dr. Simon will participate on Panel 2 : Hate and Extermination :Warning Signs of Genocidal Tendencies during the Conference.

This article by Dr. Gvosdev appeared in "The National Interest" and may be accessed by following the accompanying link. Dr. Gvosdev's "Russian Foreign Policy : Interests, Vectors and Sectors" (2014) and "Decision--making in American Foreign Policy : Translating Theory into Practice" (2019) is in the Henry Eccles Library of the Naval War College.

Dr. James Holmes, who is Professor of Strategy and Policy at the U.S. Naval War College, published this article in "The National Interest." This link will connect you to his commentary. Professor Holmes's "Chinese Naval Strategy in the 21st Century : The Turn to Mahan" (2008) and "Defending the Strait : Taiwan's Naval Strategy in the 21st Century " (2011) are in the Learning Commons of the Naval War College.