Secretary Hegseth has rightly tasked the nation’s military to refocus on its core and most essential function—fighting and winning our nation’s wars. This is the heart of his direction for restoring the warfighting ethos, and it carries important implications for institutions like the National War College. 

This October marks the 40th anniversary of what is easily the most important reform of the U.S military in modern times: the Goldwater–Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986.

Αrtificial intelligence (AI) technologies have reached a tipping point after decades of development.

Full knowledge and understanding of the true meaning of operational objectives are the main prerequisites for sound planning and execution of major operations.

Οn December 20, 2010, the Senate Committee on Armed Services denied the Pentagon’s request, endorsed by President Barack H. Obama, for the posthumous advance of Air Force Major General John D. Lavelle to the retired list in the rank of general.

Τhe decisive ground of tomorrow’s wars will not be a hilltop, a seaport, or outer space; it will be within the human mind. Victory will belong to forces that can rapidly discern truth from deception. Adversaries across the world weaponize information to fracture alliances and erode unit cohesion.

Warfighting communities provide officers with the necessary skills to operate weapon systems and cultivate their experience to lead in combat, but once junior officers are promoted to higher ranks, they often lack the abilities required of senior national security professionals. Joint professional military education (JPME) plays a deliberate and pivotal role in an officer’s operational and strategic growth.

Α renewed wave of cyberattacks on critical infrastructure calls into question the United States’ ability to combat cyberspace threats to the systems the nation relies on most.

Τhe character of war is undergoing a seismic transformation driven by emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), autonomy, and quantum-enabled capabilities. Meanwhile, the United States Department of War (DOW) faces a well-documented crisis of speed and innovation in its acquisition system. Decades of peacetime optimization and bureaucratic layering have yielded a process that is “too slow to be competitive and is only incrementally innovative.”

Οn February 13, 2025, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Commander of U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), General Gregory M. Guillot, expressed concern over rising threats to the homeland. Specifically, he mentioned increased cooperation among China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran; combined Chinese-Russian bomber patrols near Alaska; and Russian naval incursions along the U.S. East Coast.

Arthur Herman, in Freedom’s Forge, observed: “Business leaders discovered that in a crisis their most valuable assets were not just factories and capital, but their own knowledge, skills, and ideas.”

In March 1942, the Japanese Empire seized Java, an island in the South Pacific located between Sumatra and Bali. In doing so. it eliminated 90 percent of the world’s supply of quinine, the most effective antimalarial drug in existence at the time.

Blood is critical to casualty care, and managing the blood supply chain in expeditionary environments presents unique logistic challenges, especially in nonpermissive environments. Ensuring the availability of blood in resource-limited, remote settings far from established medical infrastructure requires sophisticated coordination.

Within a month of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, DC, the United States began a military offensive against al-Qaeda’s center of operations in Afghanistan and the country’s ruling Taliban regime, which had harbored the terrorist organization since the mid-1990s.

Αfter nearly 25 years of security force assistance as a pillar of national security strategy, U.S. strategists and practitioners still struggle to predict when the tool will succeed in building up a partner nation’s military and security apparatus to confront its threats. To date, the ability of any model of security force assistance to predict the results of an engagement has as much fidelity as a Magic 8 Ball. 

Ιn the run-up to the start of the Russo-Ukraine War in February 2022, numerous analysts from the U.S. Government and academic sources assessed whether Vladimir Putin would invade and, if so, what the likely outcome of a Russian invasion would be. The U.S. intelligence community accurately projected that Putin would invade, but the predictions about the war’s outcome turned out to be wrong. Russia did invade, but Ukraine successfully deflected the brunt of Russia’s aggression.

From the “Old Breed” World War II memoirs of Eugene Sledge and Robert Leckie, Marine grunts with a flair for writing have added immeasurably to our understanding of war. Their storytelling tends to capture the bottom-up perspectives of warriors suddenly confronted by the imponderables of military history, those unforgettable moments when events smite the best-laid plans of officials far removed from current conflicts. That same perspective frames every chapter of Chas Henry’s superb quest to preserve the memories of the 13 Marines killed and more than 73 injured when a bizarre flash fire erupted on the slopes of Japan’s Mount Fuji in October 1979.