A nation must think before it acts.
National Security
Pivot but Hedge: A Strategy for Pivoting to Asia While Hedging in the Middle East
The U.S. government’s new emphasis on the Asia-Pacific represents a bold strategic choice that could animate U.S. national security policy for years to come. Yet the United States must balance its rightful new focus on the Asia-Pacific with the...
Read more »“The Army of the Constitution”: the Military, American Values, and the Early Republic
Any man or woman who enlists in the United States Army must take the following oath: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that...
Read more »Gen. George C. Marshall and the Development of a Professional Military Ethic
I want to say, first of all, that you are the saints of your profession. Most of you are high school teachers. This is the most important period of education in the life of a young person—13 to 17,...
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The Foreign Fighters Problem, Recent Trends and Case Studies: Selected Essays
Introduction On the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines have confronted third-party national combatants. Known as “foreign fighters,” these individuals have gained deadly skills and connections that can be exported or exploited to devastating...
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Toward a U.S.-Mexico Security Strategy: The Geopolitics of Northern Mexico and the Implications for U.S. Policy
Introduction Since Mexican President Felipe Calderón took office in December 2006, Mexico’s drug war has taken over 30,000 lives, destabilized the U.S.-Mexico border, and become a security crisis for the North American continent. Two years ago, a December 2008...
Read more »Nine Years After September 11, 2001: Perspective on the First Decade of an Enduring Conflict
As some of you know, I have a very personal connection-intellectually and physically-with the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. In 1999, I served as a scholar on a bi-partisan blue-ribbon commission that issued a report,...
Read more »The McChrystal Affair and U.S. Civil-Military Relations
Writing before the 2008 election, Richard Kohn, the eminent historian and student of US civil-military relations, predicted that “the new administration, like its predecessors, will wonder to what extent it can exercise civilian ‘control.’ If the historical pattern holds,...
Read more »‘Hybrid Threats’: Neither Omnipotent Nor Unbeatable
Abstract Hybrid threats have now joined a growing suite of alternative concepts about the ever evolving character of modern conflict. Here and abroad, the hybrid threat construct has found traction in official policy circles despite its relative novelty. It...
Read more »Counterinsurgency Principles for the Diplomat
Abstract The recent resurgence of interest in insurgency and counterinsurgency has revealed a deficit in material written by and for the diplomat, the actor ostensibly responsible for the political component of a counterinsurgency campaign. Classical theorists stress that progress...
Read more »Putting a Human and Historical Face on Intelligence Contracting
Abstract This history of intelligence contracting in the United States is in many ways the story of American intelligence itself. For all the current criticism of this “new post-9/11 industry,” intelligence contracting pre-existed the creation of formal intelligence bureaucracies...
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