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Executive Summary
No full textAs you work through some of the pressing issues facing the joint force, we are here to help your ideas get a complete and full airing out. The only way we can change is to help each other to see the need to do so and then suggest a proper path to that new future. We need you to help be a good wingman and show us how to succeed
Study, Not Doctrine: Prioritizing History in JPME
No full textThe article explores the unpredictable and uncertain nature of war, arguing that understanding war requires a descriptive rather than a predictive approach. Strategic forecasting often fails, and the true nature of war is often only clear in hindsight. By examining historical conflicts, we can anticipate challenges in future conflicts. The article seeks to determine the best way to study war to enhance the strategic judgment of future leaders. It emphasizes the importance of a long-term perspective, focusing on the constantly changing character of war rather than the unchanging nature. A history-led approach can create a foundation for future military strategies
Seeking the Bomb
No full textAfter 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
Cognitive Warfare: The Fight for Gray Matter in the Digital Gray Zone
No full textΤhe United States is facing unprecedented challenges in the cognitive domain. While democracies struggle to develop frameworks that promote collective understanding, adversaries are employing gray zone tactics—those that never rise to the level of war—as a form of cognitive warfare against the United States and other democratic societies. François du Cluzel, head of innovative projects at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)’s Allied Command Transformation Innovation Hub, describes the key distinctions of the emerging cognitive domain:
Cognitive warfare degrades the capacity to know, produce, or thwart knowledge. Cognitive sciences cover all the sciences that concern knowledge and its processes (psychology, linguistics, neurobiology, logic, and more).
Cognitive warfare is, therefore, the way of using knowledge for a conflicting purpose. In its broadest sense, cognitive
warfare is not limited to the military or institutional world. Since the early 1990s, this capability has tended to be applied to the political, economic, cultural, and societal fields.
Any user of modern information technologies is a potential target. It targets the whole of a nation’s human capital
Considering the Utility of Modern Blockade in a Protracted Conflict With China
No full textThis article explores whether a U.S.-led maritime blockade could be an effective strategy in a prolonged conflict with China, particularly if China attempts to take Taiwan by force. Drawing from historical examples, such as the Union blockade during the Civil War and the Allied blockade of Germany in WWI, targeting China’s heavy reliance on maritime imports and exports could destabilize its economy and apply pressure on the Chinese Communist Party. However, China’s advanced naval capabilities, robust land-based defenses, and diplomatic challenges with neutral states add layers of difficulty. The article highlights the need to balance two conflicting approaches: countervalue operations that disrupt China’s economy and counterforce actions targeting Chinese military assets. Krasnicki suggests that a carefully managed blockade, backed by allied support and diplomacy, could prevent further escalation, minimize the need for direct strikes on Chinese territory, and allow for post-conflict economic recovery
Prisoner of the Caucasus?
No full textFor much of the past three decades, the South Caucasus has been internally fragmented, with former imperial hegemon Russia attempting to manipulate the region’s multiple conflicts to keep Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia from spinning too far out of Moscow’s orbit. Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine therefore created a fundamentally new reality. Russian distraction both provided the three South Caucasus states new freedom of action and created opportunities for other regional and non-regional actors to bolster their political, economic, and security presence. These include the United States, which now has occasion to rethink its approach to a strategically significant region that has, arguably, been less of a priority in recent years
Directed Energy Remains Key Suspect Behind Havana Syndrome
No full textRecent assertions by key individuals within the U.S. government that anomalous health incidents of the so-called “Havana Syndrome” have supported theories that these incidents were due to exposure to some form of directable energy devices; and attributable, in part, to involvement and activity of foreign intelligence operations
The Future of Great Power Competition: Trajectories, Transitions, and Prospects for Catastrophic War
No full textΤhe dominant geostrategic framework of international relations today is that of a Great Power competition (GPC) among three rivalrous, globally dominant states: the United States, Russia, and China. After more than two decades of mainly cooperation and collaboration, they drifted into de facto competition at the end of the 2000s. By the middle of the 2010s, their undeclared but obvious rivalry intensified. Fully acknowledged GPC arrived in late 2017 when the United States published its National Security Strategy and declared a formal end to the 25-year era of U.S.-led globalization and active American democratization initiatives
Forward Persistence in Great Power Cyber Competition
No full textThe United States, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and Russia are engaged in Great Power strategic competition below the threshold of armed conflict which has fragmented the internet and rendered inadequate America’s historical preference for an orderly, law-based framework that manages cyber-competition. The U.S. needs to focus on a Relative Power Erosion Framework featuring persistent engagement and a hunt forward posture. USCYBERCOM-led cyber campaigns are necessary in the short-term for effective American strategic cyber competition. In the longer-term, unique American military capabilities for persistent cyber engagement should be replaced with those in selected civilian governmental agencies more befitting of a ‘new normal’ for endemic cyber-competitive interactions among the Great Powers
Joint Force Quarterly, Issue 115, 4th Quarter 2024
No full textThis JFQ issue highlights a range of military and security issues, including Arctic defense, health system impacts, and military readiness, while celebrating the achievements of joint professional military education and student essays on national security topics