A Nation Must Think Before it Acts
Submissions
A nation must think before it acts.
Submissions
The FPRI Center for the Study of Intelligence and Nontraditional Warfare welcomes unsolicited articles that help further the Center’s mission of studying
Our vision is twofold. First, we want our publications to educate to help others navigate; meaning to both educate the public on intelligence activities and nontraditional warfare while also assisting practitioners with lessons learned to guide them in their current duties. Second, we encourage prospective authors to trailblaze new paths by investigating current challenges in the fields of intelligence and nontraditional warfare and recommending possible solutions to these challenges, with an emphasis towards the unorthodox or the revolutionary. Finally, we wish to also explore the horizon for both oncoming challenges and threats to America’s ability to conduct intelligence and nontraditional warfare operations.
If you wish to write for the Center, please first review our published articles for a sense of what has already met our expectations. The introductory article announcing the Center and its purposes can provide you an additional sense of what we are looking for. Remember that articles should be written with dual audiences in mind: the general public and the specialist. For the former, please do not assume that they will have the same historical knowledge of a subject that you do or will understand the jargon or acronyms of a particular subject. Be prepared to bring them along to your main point step-by-step. For the latter, try to provide a perspective that is fresh and practical to answer current issues. Complain if you wish, but have a solution as well.
Please note that the Center eschews the term “hybrid warfare” because that term has become a conglomeration of numerous and often conflicting definitions and interpretations. We are also leery of similar terms such as “grey-zone conflict,” “grey-area warfare,” “non-linear war,” “fourth-generation warfare,” etc., because of their ambiguous nature. If you do decide to use these terms, please provide concise and cogent descriptions of what exactly you mean and why these specific terms are relevant to the argument you are making. Many terms are bandied about without clear definitions and with time are likely to go the way as others before them such as Military Operations Other Than War (MOOTW), Low Intensity Conflict (LIC), Brushfire Wars; the list is considerable.
Within the Center’s purview are a wide range of subjects including intelligence collection analysis, policy, oversight, and counterintelligence; and irregular warfare elements such as insurgency and counter-insurgency, terrorism and counter-terrorism, unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, psychological operations, and civil affairs operations to name just a few. Political warfare has the widest purview as it can include all elements of national power short of declared war to achieve a political goal. Its instruments range from covert action, economic warfare, and political warfare to the use of cyber, financial, and informational statecraft tools. Articles on these or other related topics are welcome; authors should strive however to connect what they write on to a current issue.
If you would like to send a pitch instead of a full article, please provide us with a short summary of your main thesis of your article and the approach you intend to take to answer it. We will respond and let you know if you are on the right track or not.
Submissions should be sent to this link as a Microsoft Word attachment in Times New Roman twelve-point font with 1.5 spacing between lines and one-inch margins. We ask that articles be between 2,500-5,000 words, not counting endnotes. Longer articles will be considered on a case-by-case basis. In the email submission, please provide full contact information and a brief biography of the author not to exceed four sentences. We assume that all draft articles are exclusively for consideration of the FPRI Center for the Study of Intelligence and Nontraditional Warfare at the time of their submission. If you wish to submit your article to another publisher at the same time as submitting it to the Center, please inform us of this upfront.
Again, we welcome unsolicited articles and hope you will consider writing for our Center to help us fulfill our mission of studying intelligence activities and nontraditional warfare in order to help educate and explore how they best support national security.