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Sept. 30, 2014

2014 Winners

The NDU Foundation is proud to support the annual Secretary of Defense, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Joint Force Quarterly essay competitions. NDU Press hosted the final round of judging on May 15–16, 2014, during which 23 faculty judges from 15 participating professional military education institutions selected the best entries in each category. The First Place winners in each of the three categories are published in the following pages.

Sept. 30, 2014

Deterrence with China: Avoiding Nuclear Miscalculation

As China rises and the United States seeks to maintain its global dominance, the world is faced with a new historical phenomenon: a dramatic shift in power between two nuclear-capable nations. As the relative power of each nation nears parity, tension is inevitable and the character of the evolving Sino-U.S. relationship poses a risk of nuclear miscalculation. Nuclear use between China and the United States would be a catastrophe, but China is an independent actor, and the United States can only influence, but not control, the crossing of the nuclear threshold. If U.S. policymakers neglect this risk, miscalculation is more likely.

Sept. 30, 2014

The Limits of Cyberspace Deterrence

As a concept, deterrence has been part of the military vernacular since antiquity. In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides quotes Hermocrates as stating, “Nobody is driven into war by ignorance, and no one who thinks that he will gain anything from it is deterred by fear.”2 In the 2,400 years since then, the domains for the conduct of military affairs have expanded from the original land and maritime domains to air, space, and now cyberspace. As warfighting expanded its scope, strategic theory did as well. Today, U.S. doctrine declares that the fundamental purpose of the military is to deter or wage war in support of national policy.3 Therefore, military strategists and planners have a responsibility to assess how adversaries may be deterred in any warfighting domain. Through the joint planning process, planners, working through the interagency process, consider deterrent options for every instrument of national power—diplomatic, informational, military, and economic—across all phases of military operations.4 However, most of the thought and analysis in deterrence has revolved around the use of conventional and nuclear weapons.

Sept. 30, 2014

Opportunities in Understanding China’s Approach to the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands

In 2010, two Japanese coast guard vessels and a Chinese fishing boat collided in the disputed waters near the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, sparking increasingly confrontational behavior by both China and Japan. The pattern of escalation continued in 2012 when Japan nationalized several of the disputed islands by purchasing them from the private owner. China promptly responded by sending warships to the area in a show of force. Although escalation to the point of war is unlikely, these incidents underscore the destabilizing regional effects of the disputed islands and associated maritime boundaries. China’s territorial claims are rooted in historical context, nationalism, national security, and economic interests.3 By understanding China’s perspectives, motives, and approaches to resolving this dispute, the United States can anticipate the current pattern of escalation, forecast future Chinese behavior, and identify opportunities for conflict management and eventual de-escalation to improve strategic stability in the region.

Sept. 30, 2014

Cyber Security as a Field of Military Education and Study

Information and communication technologies are acknowledged as enablers and the core arsenal of military capabilities, functions, and operations. An increasing number of nations pursue improved fluency and agility of armed forces personnel in information and communication technology, its contemporary uses, and relevant defense and security implications. Underdeveloped terminology and concepts, combined with recognized functional needs and national ambitions to control the relatively new battlespace and domain, create ambiguity and even anxiety among the current generation of planners and leaders. Particularly challenging is the balance between technical in-depth knowledge requirements and strategic understanding of the cyber domain desirable for joint planners, field commanders, and senior decisionmakers.

Sept. 30, 2014

Why Military Officers Should Study Political Economy

Officers with an economics background, however, know differently; other issues are at play. First, there is the likelihood of the “resource curse,” the contention that states lacking in rule of law and stable institutions are more susceptible to various forms of nonstate violence and have low levels of economic and political development while their elites and institutions are more likely to engage in rentier behavior. Second, development generally is a multigenerational undertaking. The average state takes 40 years to graduate from low-income status to low-middle-income status—a timeline well beyond the interest of most external powers currently involved in Afghanistan, for example.

Sept. 30, 2014

Low Cost, High Returns: Getting More from International Partnerships

Unbeknownst to most Americans, over 8,000 international military personnel are trained or educated annually in the United States at the invitation of the U.S. Government, studying every aspect of the military profession. The most select officers with future leadership potential are invited to participate in senior Professional Military Education (PME) courses alongside U.S. officers at schools such as National Defense University (NDU) and the Army, Naval, Air, and Marine Corps War Colleges. Many of these students are funded by the United States through security assistance programs such as the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program, which has an annual cost of over $100 million. This is a significant investment of time and treasure by the United States, and as we will show, the initial returns of these programs are high.

Sept. 30, 2014

Asymmetry Is Strategy, Strategy Is Asymmetry

Much of the strategic studies literature of the past two decades identifies profound novelty in the conduct and challenges of modern war, novelty that ultimately calls into question the nature and even existence of war. War has allegedly now been transformed from a regular, conventional, purportedly symmetric exercise into an irregular, unconventional, asymmetric event, which must be understood anew.

Sept. 30, 2014

Is Military Science “Scientific”?

The term military science generally describes the body of theories, concepts, and methods for employing armed forces. However, as an academic discipline it is ill defined, drawing from a patchwork of curricula including history, foreign affairs, security studies, leadership, operations management, and systems engineering, as well as other elements of the physical and social sciences. Notably, the Department of Defense dictionary does not even provide a definition. This vague categorization is somewhat reflective of the term’s diminished status from its 19th-century usage when Military Science was frequently capitalized and placed alongside Physics, Philosophy, and other well-established academic disciplines.

Sept. 30, 2014

The Best Man for the Job? Combatant Commanders and the Politics of Jointness

The U.S. military today fights jointly. A joint commander—reporting to the Secretary of Defense—commands all Service components during military operations. And as a key sign of this jointness, combatant commanders no longer come solely from a single Service as they once did. In fact, the combatant commanders and their control of operations are often considered the greatest expression of jointness.