National Security

National ReviewReviewed by FPRI’s Mackubin Thomas OwensHow Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon, by Rosa Brooks (Simon & Schuster, 448 pp., $29.95)In 1992, an Air Force lieutenant colonel named Charles Dunlap published an...

The Washington Post Fifteen years after 9/11, confronting terrorism remains a central American priority. U.S. forces are still deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq; others carry out counterterrorism missions throughout the world. In recent years, opinions about al-Qaeda’s fortunes have...

War on the Rocks Lukas Milevski, The Evolution of Modern Grand Strategic Thought (Oxford University Press, 2016).  The importance of grand strategy should be evident today as the United States finds itself at a transition point.  In a world...

Exactly two decades ago, on August 23, 1996, Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States. At the time, few people paid much attention. But it was the start of what’s now the Twenty Years’ War between the...

The Atlantic  On August 1, the Obama administration announced a series of airstrikes against Islamic State positions in the Libyan city of Sirte, in coordination with a ground assault by Libya’s internationally recognized, Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA)....

Despite concerns noted by scholars and professional military officers over the past 15 years, we have not paid enough attention to the topics of civil-military relations and the professional character of the U.S. officer corps. This is unfortunate. ...

Republican voters today are divided between three broad tendencies: internationalist, nationalist, and non-interventionist. Donald Trump won the GOP presidential primaries this year partly by playing upon these divisions in an unconventional way. He assembled a new, ideologically...

Congress and the Pentagon are pursuing a number of initiatives that should significantly reshape tomorrow’s force. Defense Secretary Ash Carter has advanced a “Force of the Future” project with a series of proposals that focus on personnel system...

The article below by Mackubin Owens was given as a talk entitled “Naval Warfare: The Strategic Influence of Sea Power” at The Institute of World Politics on July 18, 2016. Recent focus on terrorism and US wars in the...