May 21, 2025

Movement and Maneuver at Leyte, October 1944

Today’s joint force is grappling with changes in the character of war as a complex interplay of human innovation, proliferating technology, and international politics drives an expansion of warfighting domains.

May 21, 2025

Both Joint and Not Medical Support at Okinawa, 1945

In 1945, the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps invaded Okinawa. Heavy casualties were projected, and medical planning was thorough and multi-layered. Medical support was as joint as anything the period could offer, although quite different from today.

May 21, 2025

Defusing Weaponized Interdependence: A New Approach to Measuring Country Reliability

Eisenhower School faculty members Michael Harsch and Shaun Lee have developed an interesting analysis method for assessing the willingness of one nation to partner with another. This article explores how growing geopolitical risks are challenging the way countries manage global trade and supply chains.

May 21, 2025

Obstacles to Integrating Deterrence

This article calls for a strategic shift in how the United States addresses today’s security threats—ranging from peer nuclear adversaries to disruptive emerging technologies.

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

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

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.

July 19, 2024

Beyond Ukraine

These are lively times for discus- sions about the future of war. After decades of conjecture about what war between two large nation-state militaries with modern ground, sea, and air capabilities might look like, we now have real data and experiences to draw on. Some trends now seem confirmed—such as the lethality of the modern battlefield for rotary-wing and fixed-wing aviation forward of the line of contact and, concurrently, the growing military value of unmanned autonomous systems. With other questions about the character of warfare, the debate has grown even fiercer—such as what the balance is between offense and defense, or what the significance and role of cyberwar- fare is. Questions about trends—in what Michael Howard calls the for- gotten dimensions of strategy—have also reappeared: What constitutes a sustainable defense industrial base, what is the value of professional armies versus citizen armies, and what causes a society to choose resistance instead of submission?