Oct. 19, 2021

Joint Force Quarterly 103 (4th Quarter, October 2021)

This issue of Joint Force Quarterly includes the winning essays from our annual Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Essay Competitions, along with features from a number of seasoned national security professionals. We hope you'll let us know which articles resonate with you.

Oct. 19, 2021

The PRC’s Changing Strategic Priorities in Latin America: From Soft Power to Sharp Power Competition

The willingness of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to give billions of dollars in loans across Latin America created the perception that the PRC is spending unlimited resources to woo allies in a region where the United States historically carries significant influence. Currently, the PRC is heightening this perception by delivering millions of COVID-19 vaccines to Latin America, buttressed by a robust media operation to shape the information environment. Far less visible are the PRC’s concerted regional efforts to reshape commercial supply chain architecture, cyber and telecommunications systems, and markets to depend on Chinese technologies, standards, and hardware for the PRC’s long-term benefit and America’s loss.

Oct. 14, 2021

Purpose-Built Antiarmor Teams: An Imperative for the Marine Corps Ground Combat Element

The Marine Corps has an “institutional misunderstanding of armor” that leaves its Ground Combat Element (GCE) ill-equipped to defeat the armored platforms that our peer adversaries employ. The Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF) has no active antiarmor doctrine and likewise lacks a purpose-built, ground-based antiarmor capability. The Marine Corps must establish modern antiarmor doctrine and restructure the training and equipping of Combined Anti-Armor Teams (CAATs) across the GCE to remain globally competitive across the full spectrum of conflict.

Oct. 14, 2021

Joint Doctrine Update

Joint Publications (JPs) under revision and signed within the past six months.

Oct. 14, 2021

Read the Manual: Reversing the Trends of Failure in NATO Humanitarian Interventions with Airpower

Alliance leaders should more heavily weigh insights from their own military doctrine when deliberating if and how to embark on another humanitarian intervention using airpower without a conventional ground force. At a minimum, such consideration should give NATO leaders a better sense of what is realistically possible with airpower. With this better sense, they should be able to make more effective decisions on, if, and how to use the military instrument to achieve humanitarian objectives if airpower is the most robust military means available to them.

Oct. 14, 2021

Proxy War: The Least Bad Option

If proxy wars will haunt the future, as Tyrone Groh suggests, then Proxy War will prove to be not only useful but also essential. Writing to policymakers and strategists, Groh offers many valuable considerations for clear and sober thinking about the employment of a proxy and, conversely, how to overcome a proxy threat.

Oct. 14, 2021

2034: A Novel of the Next World War

After 20 years of grinding war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon is trying hard to turn away from counterinsurgency in the Middle East to focus on deterring conventional conflict with Russia and China. Into this situation, Marine combat veteran Elliot Ackerman and retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis have dropped—with impeccable timing—a novel that imagines what could go wrong if that pivot fails to deter America’s near-peer adversaries.

Oct. 14, 2021

How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict

In a time with both a global pandemic and a U.S. Presidential election characterized by manipulated narratives, a fresh perspective contemplating disinformation—false information knowingly shared to cause harm—is both timely and important. A book, however, about how to lose the information war, as framed by author Nina Jankowicz, is exactly the perspective needed to highlight the high stakes and growing threat of disinformation.

Oct. 14, 2021

Wartime Innovation and Learning

The following case study details how one leader effectively integrated new operational concepts with a novel technological device to generate a capability in a combat theater. A collection of adaptations produced a new military innovation that was developed and tested incrementally and then applied in wartime. It is a great example of the integration of the research and development community operating forward in time of war to improve a new technology. A few insights regarding leadership and JPME can be drawn from this example. There are no detailed blueprints that we can draw upon for how to best exploit new technologies in every case, but history remains our best source for generating the right questions in the future.

Oct. 14, 2021

History of the Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

How the senior enlisted advisor to the Chairman (SEAC) position developed mirrors how other such senior enlisted advisor positions began and reflects the evolution of jointness.