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CMSI Note 18: Flooding the Zone: The Use of Civilian Landing Craft (LCTs) in PLA Amphibious Operations
No full textIn July and August 2025, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) employed a unique type of civilian deck cargo ship known as a Landing Craft Tank (LCT) to transport military vehicles directly to shore as part of an amphibious landing exercise. While civilian deck cargo ships of this type have been observed in previous PLA over-the-shore logistics exercises, they had only been used to transport vehicles and equipment from port-to-port—simulating the transport of forces into a captured port—not directly to an unimproved beachhead. If the PLA develops the ability to coordinate and employ significant numbers of civilian LCTs to transport forces directly onto Taiwan beaches, it could significantly improve its over the-shore assault capacities and logistics capabilities.
CMSI’s Perspectives and Key Takeaways Experimentation with civilian LCTs in direct beach landings is the latest innovation in the PLA’s attempts to identify and train to the optimal combination of military and civilian amphibious assault and over-the-shore logistics capabilities. Based on satellite imagery observations, there are two main types of LCTs used in PLA exercises: a smaller, stern deckhouse version; and a larger, forward deckhouse variant—both with open cargo decks. LCTs may offer the PLA a type of over-the-shore lift that fills a gap between when a first echelon amphibious assault hits the beach and when the PLA might be able to capture and use a Taiwanese port or erect floating causeways or Shuiqiao Landing Platform Utility (LPU) vessels at a beachhead. Landing LCTs onto a beach would allow for immediate support from non swimming logistics elements of the first echelon forces—such as trucks and heavier non amphibious armored vehicles.https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cmsi-notes/1017/thumbnail.jp
7th Annual Alexander C. Cushing International Law Conference
No full textThe Institute for Maritime Affairs and Law of the Sea (IMLOS), in collaboration with the Stockton Center for International Law (SCIL) of the U.S. Naval War College (USNWC) and Amador Research Services, hosted the 7th Annual Alexander C. Cushing International Law Conference, “Security at Sea,” on May 13–14, 2025, at the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Law Bonifacio Global City (BGC) Campus in Manila, Philippines. The annual Alexander C. Cushing International Law Conference brings together world-renowned scholars and practitioners in international law and oceans law and policy to address pressing and emerging issues in maritime law, governance, and security at sea, drawing participants from international organizations, academia, the diplomatic corps, and military and government legal and operational communities worldwide.
Marking a historic milestone as the first Cushing Conference hosted outside the United States, the 2025 program centered on international legal frameworks governing naval, coast guard, and expeditionary Marine forces in the Indo-Pacific region, with distinguished contributors from Australia, France, Germany, Vietnam, Malaysia, Japan, India, Singapore, the Philippines, and the United States. Panels addressed issues including lawfare and maritime security in Southeast Asia; jurisdictional competition and territorial disputes in East Asia; undersea infrastructure and strategic competition; gray-zone challenges in the law of naval warfare; and peacetime and conflict-related maritime issues ranging from fishing and seabed mining to Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS), maritime trade, convoy law, and interoperability and force synchronization.
Event | 7th Annual Alexander C. Cushing International Conferencehttps://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cushing-conference/1004/thumbnail.jp
AI-Enabled Decision-Support Systems in the Joint Targeting Cycle: Legal Challenges, Risks, and the Human(e) Dimension
No full textIsrael’s military campaign in Gaza as well as ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria include the reported military use of AI-enabled decision-support systems (AI-DSS) within the joint targeting cycle (JTC). These tools use AI techniques to collect and analyze data, provide information about the operational environment, and make actionable recommendations with the aim of aiding military decision-makers in evaluating factors relevant to legal compliance, such as taking precautions and ensuring proportionality in attacks. These systems are often touted as being simply a human aid and, as such, have flown largely under the radar regarding regulation as they are perceived to fall short of fully autonomous systems. We challenge this narrative. In this article, we evaluate the effects of AI-DSS reportedly used within the JTC by elucidating several factors that, especially if considered in combination, warrant increased attention from a legal perspective. These include the effects of speed and scale of AI-enabled targeting on human judgment, inherent error risks of the systems (including accuracy issues), and cognitive biases that could potentially lead to or even engender IHL violations, specifically focusing on the principle of precautions in attack. Within the topic of AI, law, and fundamental values/principles in society, our contribution aims to critically engage with claims that the speed and scale AI offers on the battlefield is without massive risks in an existential way, speaking to what kinds of wars we will be fighting, what it means to fight war augmented by AI-enabled systems, and what it means essentially to be human(e) in war in the age of AI
“I Plead Ignorance”: Autonomous Weapons and Criminal Liability for Not Knowing the Knowable
No full textForthcoming 2026
Episode 11: NATO and the Warsaw Pact: Collective Security in the Post - WWII World
No full textIn this episode of Strategy Matters, we explore the strategic logic behind the formation of NATO in the aftermath of World War II. The discussion examines the post-World War world from Western and Soviet perspectives and highlights how economic challenges, political instability, and ideological competition shaped early Cold War security decisions. Guests Dr. David Stone and Dr. Timothy Hoyt emphasize the alliance as a solution to European post-war challenges and contrast NATO with earlier failed efforts at collective security. The episode closes by exploring enduring lessons about alliance credibility and the importance of aligning all instruments of national power in coalitions.
The opinions expressed on this podcast represent the views of the presenters and do not reflect the official position of the Department of War, The US Navy, or US Naval War College.
Guests:
Dr. Timothy Hoyt, Ph.D. is the John Nicholas Brown Chair of Counterterrorism and, since 2019, has also served as the Director of the Advanced Strategy Program at the U.S. Naval War College. He is the author of numerous publications on irregular warfare, COIN and counterterrorism, and South Asia. Dr Hoyt also serves as the Deputy Editor of The Journal of Strategic Studies.
Dr. David Stone, Ph.D., the William E. Odom Professor of Russian Studies, joined the Strategy and Policy Department in 2015. He received a B.A. from Wabash College and a Ph.D. in history from Yale. He previously taught at Kansas State University. His book “Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union” (2000) won the Shulman Prize and the Best First Book Prize of the Historical Society. He has also published “A Military History of Russia” (2006) and “The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914-1917” (2015). He edited “The Soviet Union at War, 1941-1945” (2010). He is the author of several dozen articles on Russian military history and foreign policy.https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/strategy-matters/1010/thumbnail.jp
