The April 2023 issue of Joint Force Quarterly features a positive review of our book, "Cyber Persistence Theory: Redefining National Security in Cyberspace" by Stafford Ward, alongside an article on cyber and deterrence by James Van de Velde. Both pieces present discordant views on U.S. Cyber Command's approach to persistent engagement and how it fits with a strategy of deterrence and the more recent concept of integrated deterrence. As theorists and a practitioner in persistent engagement, we offer some clarification.

Your voice in how best to move the joint force forward can only help achieve both the mission of this journal and the goals of the new Joint Warfighting Concept. Every successful leader at every level knows the wisdom of how to bring diverse talents together to achieve the mission. The Chairman and JFQ are looking for your ideas on how to achieve success together as we deal with the world today and in the future.

Geostrategic competition and rapidly advancing technology are driving fundamental changes to the character of war. Our opportunity to ensure that we maintain an enduring competitive advantage is fleeting. We must modernize the Joint Force to deter our adversaries, defend the United States, ensure future military advantage, and, if necessary, prevail in conflict.

As nations around the world continue to pursue lethal autonomous platforms for use on the battlefield, the lack of a commonly understood framework for their employment increases the risk of inadvertent or accidental escalation due to miscommunication or misinterpretation of deterrent signals in competition and crisis.

The Mantell incident and other military UAP sightings make it clear that misidentification remains a common problem in complex operating environments. They demonstrate how distinguishing one’s joint force and interagency partners (or their assets) from an enemy force, from civilians and other noncombatants, or even from environmental phenomena can be a challenge in the best of circumstances. Misidentification of friendly (or nonhostile) airborne assets can lead to expensive or even fatal accidents in the field.

The winner in the race to develop quantum-based technology will have the potential to shape the world in ways that are hard to imagine today—for better or worse. The application of quantum technologies not only has the potential to reshape the national security landscape but also to determine which nation will become the foremost superpower of the 21st century.

The military's successful integration of new technologies, such as AI, is crucial in a revolution in military affairs. The advantages of AI will be realized by the military that can best employ it. To realize the groundbreaking potential of AI, military organizations should prioritize creating an AI-enabled workforce based on the nature of AI in the military. This means moving away from solely focusing on creating costly AI experts and instead adopting an AI skills-in-depth model. Training AI experts alone is insufficient for achieving revolutionary effects on the battlefield.

This article contends that to enhance national security, PME must focus on hiring and retaining more female faculty. The status of our nation’s security depends largely on the status of women in PME. Women provide diversity of thought that is otherwise unachievable; the gender perspective that female faculty provide is critical in developing our joint warfighters for tomorrow’s ways of war.

Over the past two-plus decades of military operations, our nation’s ability to use outer space has not been consequentially challenged or contested. An unintended byproduct of that circumstance is we have unintentionally conditioned strategists and national security professionals to assume the space advantage is our birthright. In our past wars our adversaries didn’t need to leverage space to fight and certainly had more important military objectives than attacking U.S. space capabilities. But if the next war is against a near-peer competitor, that will not be the case.

The foundational training of our military intelligence professionals is paramount for our national security. This training could be improved by soliciting the individual military Services by means of a multilateral approach. The Services should work together multilaterally through their lead commands for intelligence, versus unilaterally or even jointly, ensuring synchronized instruction at a foundational level. Regardless of their specific roles within the profession, all Soldiers, Marines, Sailors, Airmen, and Guardians in the intelligence profession should have a solid understanding of the core analytic tradecraft standards that should apply to their daily work.

HIV has been a recognized issue since the mid-1980s when it was linked to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Prevalence of HIV varies among militaries, often exceeding civilian rates in high-prevalence areas. Military screening typically excludes HIV-positive individuals from enlistment, indicating that infections occur after enlistment, suggesting that military personnel are often at substantially increased risk for acquiring and then possibly transmitting HIV. The Military HIV Research Program (MHRP) at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) was established in 1986 to research and develop preventive and treatment measures, evaluate the impact on U.S. Servicemembers, and protect military personnel while addressing the global burden of HIV.

SOF institution-building (SOFIB) takes on significant importance for the future because as irregular and hybrid warfare becomes more prevalent, the relevance of SOF increases. Allied and partner nation SOF can be sustainable and operationally effective in a near-peer environment only if they exist within a proper institutional framework.

Diplomats and defense attachés are expected to give a fresh assessment of a country’s strategic posture. The utility of this exercise is that, if done prudently and with an eye for nuance, it has some predictive value. Even the world’s only superpower has an interest in judging what positions other governments may take in a dispute. Beyond predictions one can identify some potentialities, that is, possible future developments that may or may not come to pass.

The purpose of security cooperation (SC) is to develop relationships, build capacity, and ensure access to partner nations to achieve U.S. objectives. The achievement of this purpose is enhanced through a holistic application of Women, Peace, and Security through gender mainstreaming. But the lack of guidance on this process and the use of gender-neutral language in doctrine foster the exclusion of gender analyses in the planning and implementation of SC activities. Failure to mainstream gender risks telling only half the story of a partner nation.

"We recruit individuals, but we retain families.” This insightful statement recognizes the importance of familial bonds in the military profession and the challenge of maintaining them while in the actively defending the Nation. The responsibility lies with the Department of Defense (DOD), and the mindset of “retain families” underscores the level of accountability. DOD's Exceptional Family Member Program (EFMP) is the primary program dedicated to serving and supporting the special needs of eligible families of Servicemembers. In execution, however, EFMP has foundational issues.

At certain times, the character of naval warfare and the course of naval history undergo rapid, profound, and lasting change. The American Civil War was such a time, and its lessons still resound.

George Schultz, the U.S. Secretary of State from 1982 to 1989, equated diplomacy to gardening: long-term cultivation and maintenance of a healthy relationship that slowly but reliably bears fruit. Peter Martin’s China’s Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy depicts a Chinese diplomatic corps that has intermittently subscribed to this philosophy. This clear and engaging book is an enlightening blend of domestic People’s Republic of China (PRC) politics, foreign policy practice, and diplomatic history with a fair amount of Zhou Enlai biography thrown in. Zhou was China’s first foreign minister (FM) from its founding in 1949 to when he stepped down as FM in 1958.

The rollout of Chat GPT-3 by OpenAI in late 2022 caused a storm of controversy. The new software created seemingly authentic and detailed answers to queries, generated passable drafts of student essays, and even managed to pass a college exam at the Wharton Business School. But some of the chatbot’s responses were also inaccurate, inappropriate, and deeply flawed. The updated version GPT-4, released in March 2023, did little to alleviate concerns about how far and how fast this technology could take us.

America’s Great-Power Opportunity is a lucid, thoughtful assessment of the problems and the possibilities with the geostrategic formulation of Great Power competition (GPC). Ali Wyne frames a narrative that captures well the major debates from 2017 through 2022 surrounding whether GPC is a proper framework for understanding America’s evolving geostrategic posture and how Washington’s global strategy should respond. Wyne adds value to the prolific number of publications on GPC during 2021 and 2022 by recommending that Washington accept the new norm of competitive geopolitics with a positivist rather than a reactive strategic agenda.

Alpha is a fast-paced, brilliantly written, and ultimately disturbing book about the health of the Navy SEAL community. Using the infamous Eddie Gallagher case for its core narrative, Alpha weaves together Gallagher’s actions and the larger developments in Naval Special Warfare during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The SEALs emerge from this era as a troubled organization, full of first-rate special operators willing to take on the toughest direct-action missions but largely devoid of a higher moral code to guide their actions and dismissive of any oversight beyond that of the insular world of special operations.

The outdated mission assurance myopia focuses on vulnerabilities related to Defense Critical Infrastructure (DCI) but neglects timely decisions that impact how we fight. The Department of Defense (DOD) is facing challenges in prioritizing and delivering constrained resources in time, space, and domain due to the inflexible nature of the existing DCI-focused MA construct. This approach overlooks key areas and stakeholders, hindering the identification of critical weaknesses affecting mission performance. The 2022 DOD Mission Assurance instruction relies on outdated off-the-shelf plans, limiting its effectiveness. To address evolving threats, DOD Global Security efforts must unite proactive approaches and enable senior leaders to make risk-informed decisions at the speed of relevance.