I am certain of one thing: Colin Gray would be exasperated with claims that “Grand strategy is dead.”1 What he would have called a “banality” is commonplace these days.2 Some question the need for ...

I am sad to be writing this now. I wish with all my heart that Colin could have heard the many tributes which have been made publicly and which our daughter and I have received privately since he d...

Colin S. Gray’s The Leverage of Sea Power1 may well be the best book on naval warfare of the last century, if not beyond. This time-span is deliberately chosen, for it excludes Julian Corbett’s Som...

Ensuring the survivability of second-strike nuclear forces is critical for strategic stability, yet some scholars contend that technological changes in surveillance by established nuclear powers are reducing their survivability in a new era of counterforce. What are the implications of the proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on deterrence between small nuclear powers (SNPs)? Would these systems allow SNPs to appreciably increase their confidence in counterforce targeting? This article examines developments in the India–Pakistan dyad to consider how the proliferation of UAVs to SNPs might alter the decision calculus regarding preemptive strikes.

Was the expansion of overseas U.S. bases from the late nineteenth century to the present driven by imperial impulses or strategic principles? Recent scholarship reflects a diverse set of perspectives on the history and politics of overseas U.S. military bases. To evaluate existing claims about the evolution and logic of overseas U.S. bases, we establish a conceptual framework for understanding an “empire of bases” based on motivational and relational attributes of basing policy. We then examine different historical junctures in the development of the U.S. overseas base network and analyze macro-level trends in basing policy.

In the 1990s, Barry Watts assessed the impact of modern technology on the incidence of general friction in warfare, concluding that the participation of humans in wars made friction nearly impossible to eliminate. The advent of autonomous weapon systems (AWS), however, has the potential to reduce the role of humans significantly. This article considers the impact of AWS on the incidence of friction in future wars. Using Watts' taxonomy of general friction as an analytical tool, it argues that while these weapons have the potential to reduce friction resulting from human limitations, they will likely increase informational uncertainty, and unintended escalation.

International crises emphasize the critical role that presidents and their advisory systems play in formulating and implementing foreign policy. Scholarly research has identified three distinct conceptual models of how presidents manage their decision-making systems – the competitive, formalistic, and collegial models. This article examines how Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump managed their advisory systems and formulated their policies toward Syria after the Assad regime employed chemical weapons against its people. The case studies demonstrate that each president employed a different approach to the decision-making processes, which significantly influenced the U.S. response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons.

"Superpower interrupted: The Chinese history of the world, Michael Schuman." Comparative Strategy, 40(1), pp. 100–101

"The folly and the glory: America, Russia, and political warfare 1945–2020, by Tim Weiner." Comparative Strategy, 40(1), pp. 99–100

America has spent nearly two decades fighting costly wars in the Middle East while its regional and near peer competitors significantly gained strength and now pose major threats to the United States and its allies. To focus on these threats, America is seeking a way to extract itself from the post 9/11 “endless wars” in the Middle East. These wars have failed because America ties its ability to achieve its strategic goals to ineffective local governments. The U.S. must cease its cumbersome nation building efforts to address the terror threat from the region while refocusing on major threats posed by Russia and Iran. The U.S. can accomplish this by exploiting existing local conflicts to fulfill counter-terror objectives while bogging Iran and Russia down in conflicts they cannot sustain. To achieve this the U.S. must move its operations out of the limelight of military action and diplomacy into the shadows of covert action.