Oct. 21, 2024

Joint Force Quarterly 115 (4th Quarter 2024)

By the time you read this, our national elections will be imminent. Our next President, regardless of whom that will be, must confront the world as it is, not as it could be. No one solution will fit all foreign conflicts, and none of these will necessarily fit our domestic needs.

Oct. 16, 2024

China’s Forever War: What If a Taiwan Invasion Fails?

As the prospects of a war across the Taiwan Strait increase, more attention is being paid to the ramifications of conflict for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the region. Analysts have pondered what a PRC victory over Taiwan could imply for the regional military balance and the broader security architecture. Others have calculated the economic disruptions that a war would cause for China as well as for the global economy. Such assessments underscore the costs of conflict and thus the need to find ways to prevent war by deterring aggression.

Oct. 7, 2024

Thirty Years of the Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction

NDU’s Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction (CSWMD), part of the Institute for National Strategic Studies, has been a trusted resource on WMD challenges to senior Defense and other interagency policy leaders for 30 years.

July 30, 2024

Joint Force Quarterly 114 (3rd Quarter 2024)

As I have written before in this space, change is a constant. NDU Press and Joint Force Quarterly are not immune to this fact. Recently, we moved to a more modern Web-based platform that will be less expensive to maintain and operate.

July 29, 2024

Engines of Chaos: Counterlogistics in Competition

July 29, 2024

Cognitive Warfare The Fight for Gray Matter in the Digital Gray Zone

July 29, 2024

Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response The Imperative of an All-Domain Approach

July 29, 2024

Jointness as Virtue: Increasing the Value of Joint Qualification to the Joint Force and Services

July 19, 2024

Commander’s Critical Information Requirements: Crucial for Decisionmaking and Joint Synchronization

Across the competition continuum, speed of action requires timely decisions and adjustments to a joint task force (JTF) operation plan. As mission command systems improve and information-gathering tools increase in sophistication, a consistent challenge for a headquarters staff is determining the relevant information to analyze for decisionmaking. Arguably, increased mission command technology and capabilities have outpaced decisionmaking performance, leaving then U.S. Army Chief of Staff General Mark A. Milley to remark, “The sheer volume and speed of conflicting information can easily bring decisionmaking to a screeching halt.” However, commander’s critical information requirements (CCIRs) are designed specifically to combat these challenges and enable the commander’s decisionmaking process.

July 19, 2024

Seeking The Bomb

After nearly 80 years of scholarship on nuclear weapons, one might understandably believe that all the important issues have been addressed, if not settled. However, Vipin Narang, professor of political science at MIT, has a knack for asking and answering questions that other nuclear strategy researchers have overlooked. Whereas most academic work looks at superpowers, Narang’s book Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2014) examines how the strategic deterrence postures of non-superpower nuclear states differ from those of superpowers. And now, in his latest, Seeking the Bomb, he extracts insights from studying the various ways states pursue nuclear weapons, discovering that most would-be nuclear powers take different proliferation paths than Great Power states.