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The Urgency of Warfighting Renewal: Five Principles for Today’s Professional Military Education
No full textThis article highlights the urgent need to reform Professional Military Education (PME) to prioritize warfighting skills and strategic thinking, as called for in the 2018 National Defense Strategy. Despite recent updates to include China and Russia-focused content, PME programs remain misaligned with their core mission of developing leaders proficient in the art and science of war.
A key challenge is the growing number of external requirements unrelated to warfighting—such as climate security and diversity initiatives—that dilute PME’s focus and weaken instructional quality. The authors recommend establishing a central authority to vet these requirements and ensure they align with warfighting priorities. Clear guidance from senior leadership, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Secretary of Defense, is essential to maintain PME’s focus on preparing leaders for operational and strategic readiness.
By resisting the tendency to treat PME as a “Swiss Army knife” for addressing all military challenges, PME institutions can better prepare leaders to meet the demands of Great Power competition and global threats
America Needs Bold, Visionary, and Strategic Joint Force Leaders
No full textSuggesting we look at how we teach leadership to the joint force, James Browning asserts that we must produce future leaders who are both bold and visionary. Today’s dangerous world demands joint force, DOD, and industrial-based leaders capable of shaping events rather than reacting to them. An effective visionary strategic joint force leader and thinker requires continuous learning, growth, and enhanced cognitive and social horsepower. Developing and executing robust PME curricula and learning programs incorporating these recommendations will prepare joint force leaders to lead effectively at the senior level and have the courage and confidence to make the bold decisions that America needs. These leaders will demonstrate personal confidence, courage, and the firm belief that their bold decisions are appropriate and will move forward with determination
Executive Summary
No full textEffective communication is essential to joint warfighting success, yet even basic tasks—like radio reprogramming—can fail without proper training and leadership. Editor in Chief William T. Eliason emphasizes the life-saving importance of communication and the need to instill such skills at every level of the force. He adds a tribute to Dr. John Church’s editorial and visual contributions to JFQ and gives an update on the temporary pause of the annual essay competitions due to logistical constraints. This issue of Joint Force Quarterly features timely analyses on China’s military reform, the challenges of integrated deterrence, visionary leadership development, and solutions to the military housing crisis. It also explores innovations in combat readiness, medical support strategies, and alliance reliability. Historical case studies from Okinawa and Leyte offer valuable lessons for modern operations
Winning the Future: The U.S. Military’s Need for Technological Dominance and Defined Strategic Vision
No full textThis blog post explores how our Joint Force, its constituent Services, and our Allies and Partners can rise to meet this Operational Environment challenge through the “prioritized strategic integration of AI and battlefield autonomy within U.S. military systems” — tempered by “human agency and accountability.” They astutely observe, “Decisive tactical and strategic advantage will not hinge upon massed firepower, but on cognitive speed, operational agility, and the fusion of advanced technologies with human command.” This, in turn, will require us to transform and inculcate a culture of anticipation, innovation, and rapid technological adaptation. Dr. Giordano and Ms. Annett provide us with three recommendations that will empower us to meet (and beat!) our adversaries
How China Could Counter U.S. Intervention in War Over Taiwan
No full textHas Beijing found a new “assassin’s mace” to keep the U.S. military out of a fight over Taiwan?
Ongoing debates over how China’s military would counter U.S. intervention often focus on precision strikes against U.S. forces in the Western Pacific. Indeed, some wargames assume that the People’s Liberation Army would throw the first punch. But such a move is not the only option available to China’s decision-makers. Other options include mounting a surprise invasion of Taiwan before the United States can mobilize, pressuring America’s allies to deny U.S. forces access to forward bases, or using strategic deterrence, which seeks to discourage Washington from defending Taiwan in the first place.
Of these options, pursuing strategic deterrence could prove most alluring for Beijing. The logic would be to convince the U.S. government that risks to the U.S. homeland, such as cyber attacks on power grids and telecommunications networks and even the specter of nuclear escalation, are too severe to contemplate. This strategy would leverage China’s expanding nuclear arsenal (and attendant nuclear signals), new intercontinental conventional missiles, space and cyber capabilities, and the belief that Beijing is inherently more resolved than Washington. Chinese leaders who embrace this thinking might conclude that a war could be limited, and thus, they might be more likely to opt for aggression.
To counter the challenge of Chinese strategic deterrence, the Trump administration should further integrate homeland defense with Indo-Pacific regional security. This would ensure unified planning to maintain deterrence both at home and abroad and would convince China that an end run around U.S. Indo-Pacific Command cannot succeed. The administration should also follow a strategic communications campaign to emphasize the grave risks of inadvertent escalation
Taming the Hegemon: Chinese Thinking on Countering U.S. Military Intervention in Asia
No full textThis publication is by INSS Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs Senior Research Fellow Dr. Joel Wuthnow. The monograph uses internal PLA writings to examine recent Chinese thinking on countering U.S. intervention in Asia, and finds that PLA experts emphasize efforts to leverage nuclear, conventional, and informational (space, cyber, and cognitive warfare) tools to deter U.S. intervention, but also advocate preparing for asymmetric attacks against key targets in the U.S. military system in case the United States intervenes anyway.https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/china-strategic-perspectives/1020/thumbnail.jp
Super Soldiers or Social Burden? Ethical Exploration of the Benefits and Costs of Military Bioenhancement
No full textElise Annett in the Eisenhower School at National Defense University, and Dr. John Shook and Dr. James Giordano in the INSS Center for Disruptive Technology for Future Warfare at National Defense University, published this article in AJOB Neuroscience. Biotechnological enhancements for military personnel arouse scrutiny, beyond the ethics of experimental research and due care during operational service, to the eventual return to a civilian life. Reversal of enhancements—by withdrawal, extraction, deactivation, modification, destruction, etc.—will be just as experimental and consequential. Super soldiering may not smoothly transition to ordinary habilitation and lifestyle. Complete reversions of dramatic augmentations, such as prosthetics or brain-computer interfacing, could be more damaging to the person than the initial installation. Partial reversions would be just as perplexing, as discharged personnel retain workable technology to prevent disability while other careers next beckon for a suitably empowered individual. Either way, all such biotechnological enhancements must be treated as ethical and social experiments having both positive and negative potential outcomes. Life stages of technologically modified military personnel require special ethical consideration beyond the lifecycle of the technology itself. The post-enhancement veteran is a largely unexplored area, and we propose that these civilian “supra-soldiers” will become a cohort of increasing interest, requiring continued care and ethical support. To that end, we suggest a system of guidelines to ensure ethically sound support for those who serve, and have served, in national defense
Rightsizing the PLA Air Force: Revisiting an Analytic Framework
No full textThis article evaluates the modernization of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) from 2007 to 2025 using the Saunders-Quam framework, which identifies four core trade-offs: changes in roles and missions, domestic versus foreign procurement, high-tech versus low-tech systems, and combat versus support aircraft. While the framework remains a useful analytical tool, it underestimated the Chinese Communist Party’s willingness to fund expensive modernization efforts and the rapid advancements in China’s defense industrial base. The article identifies key factors missing from the original framework such as doctrinal shifts, increased emphasis on counterintervention, maritime expansion, and the rise of unmanned systems. It also proposes expanding the model to include three overarching variables: perceptions of the international threat environment, changes in defense budgets, and improvements in the defense industrial base. These enhancements would strengthen the framework’s ability to assess not only PLAAF modernization but also broader force structure decisions across other PLA services and foreign militaries
Executive Summary
No full textIn this issue, JFQ Editor in Chief William T. Eliason reflects on the enduring value of joint professional military education (JPME) and the journal’s role in shaping informed national security leaders. He emphasizes the importance of history, critical thinking, and learning from past conflicts, principles rooted in Clausewitzian theory, as essential to preparing for future challenges. The issue’s Forum section tackles readiness for great power competition, especially with China, examining mobilization, PLA airpower, and Southeast Asia’s strategic geography. Additional features explore leadership development in special operations, civil-military relations, AI and deepfake threats, space-based logistics, Western Pacific access strategies, distributed medical support, and cyber force structure. Together, these contributions reinforce JPME’s mission to inform and strengthen the joint force for the complex security landscape ahead
How the U.S. and China Use Deterrence to Preserve Peace
No full textDr. Joel Wuthnow, in the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs, joined an episode of Faultlines by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. He discussed the U.S. and Chinese views on how to avoid a catastrophic military conflict between the U.S. and China. This series examines the strategic differences between the United States and China. The two nations differ in how they see economic, military, cultural, and governance issues, but was this always the case? By examining the view from both sides of the faultline can piece together how we got here and where we’re going next.https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/podcasts/1009/thumbnail.jp