As we go to press with this issue, Bashar al-Asad, one of the long-time dictators in the Middle East, has fled to Russia, and the Syrian people have risen to make that happen.

Risk is an enduring reality in strategic decisionmaking. The rigorous assessment of risk is—or should be—a critical step in strategy development.

For the past 30-plus years since the end of the Cold War, the Department of Defense has been able to operate with no real threat of nuclear weapons on the battlefield.

The Department of Defense (DOD) and its Service components are investing in advanced technologies to gain and maintain a competitive advantage over adversaries and pacing threats such as China and Russia.

Understandably, there is quite a bit of confusion about the correct use of the military term campaigning.

To the renowned scholar Thomas Schelling, the central aspect of nuclear deterrence is being believed.

When Secretary of Defense General James Mattis published the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS), one statement in the summary companion document garnered great attention—and reaction—among the professional military education (PME) community: “PME has stagnated, focused more on the accomplishment of mandatory credit at the expense of lethality and ingenuity.”

In a moving speech to the Finnish parliament last summer, Speaker Matti Vanhanen warned that Russia will continue using “brutal military power on a large scale to pursue its own illusory goals.”

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is using artificial intelligence (AI) to build a world-class military.

Political objectives are the key element of a grand or national/coalition security strategy.

The Theater Air Control System (TACS)/Army Air-Ground System (AAGS) has been a staple of joint air-ground doctrine since May 1966, when General William Westmoreland, commander, U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, integrated the air and ground systems into the first joint air-ground operations system.

Significant gaps in understanding persist across the joint and combined maritime enterprise when it comes to wargaming distributed maritime operations (DMO) and expeditionary advanced base operations (EABO) despite continued campaigns of learning.

In her address to the Eisenhower School student body at National Defense University in February 2024, Jennifer Santos, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Policy, stated that acquisition leaders can no longer afford to ignore the supply chain vulnerabilities of the industries contracted to provide materiel to the Department of Defense (DOD).

The spring winds around Sicily had shifted during the day, but not before Praetor Quintus Valerius Falto had engaged the heavily laden Carthaginian fleet.

One of the most vexing foreign policy challenges for U.S. analysts, warfighters, and policymakers is how to deal with China’s gray zone activities.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21 st Century’s Greatest Dilemma is an intriguing history of artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology (SynBio) that also affords a lay reader a sense of the state of the art in both fields.

In Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative, Aaron Bateman, assistant professor of history and international affairs at The George Washington University and a member of the university’s Space Policy Institute, distills recently declassified U.S., Soviet, and United Kingdom records to provide new insights into the origins, history, and legacy of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).

Stealth military doctrine specifies the use of antidetection technologies for the clandestine movement of friendly forces into unfriendly environments.