International Security & Defense

Why does the U.S. Army rely on persuasion to influence military partners to improve their forces despite repeated failures that undermine U.S. foreign policy goals? The army prioritizes its role as a fighting force, not an advisory group. U.S. leaders have developed an ideology—the cult of the persuasive—to advance army bureaucratic interests.

The nonpartisan ethic of the armed forces is at greater risk today than it has been in our lifetimes, and maintaining it is essential for the survival of American democracy.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, military innovation can degrade a state’s military effectiveness as well as strengthen it. In fact, innovation is a gamble that a state may lose, particularly if it is already overextended in its commitments. 

A quarter-century ago, China conducted what it called “missile tests” bracketing the island of Taiwan to deter it from a move toward independence by demonstrating that China could cut Taiwan’s ocean lifelines. In response, in a show of superiority that forced China to back down, the United States deployed two aircraft carriers to Taiwan’s adjacent waters. If China were to repeat the same missile tests today, it is highly unlikely that the United States would respond as it did in 1996. If U.S. carriers moved that close to the Chinese mainland now, they could be sunk by the DF-21 and DF-26 missiles that China has since developed and deployed. This article presents three major theses concerning the military rivalry between China and the United States in this century.

The authors argue that amid the continent's gravest threat to peace and stability since 1945, Europe needs a reliable, serious, focused Germany—not a chancellor and policy elite who need to be pushed and dragged to move.

An analysis of Taiwan’s military value concludes that its reunification with China would improve Chinese submarine warfare and ocean surveillance capabilities, tipping the military balance in China’s favor. These findings have important implications for U.S. operational planning, policy, and grand strategy.

Aroop Mukharji writes that the moment the United States became a major military power in Asia can be traced to a single day, Oct. 28, 1898. It is a story about the difficulty of letting go, and it teaches scholars and policymakers an important lesson: An everyday psychological bias can lead to years of entanglement. Foreign policy commentary is awash with debates about why one region or another is more or less relevant to U.S. national interests. Those debates are important, but they miss a general point. It is always hard to let go.

Preserving a nonpartisan military is sacred and critically important to the institution and the military’s role in defending our nation.  Today’s society is characterized by intense partisanship as seen in current events, media, and technological changes, with recent polls indicating the public’s trust in the military waning.  As a microcosm of society, military members are increasingly at risk of being influenced by this political partisanship.  A nonpartisan military is not only essential to maintain the trust of our elected civilian leaders, but also of the public and the men and women of the Armed Forces.  To preserve this trust, the Department of Defense needs to reenergize core democratic principles for military members by implementing professional military education on the foundational tenets of why the military is nonpartisan, balancing political astuteness and being political, and the effects of political influence by media, technology, and former military leaders.

Since last April, Russia has been slowly and methodically building up military forces near Ukraine’s border. Those who recall the 1990 U.S. military buildup in advance of the January “Desert Storm” attack to free Kuwait and invade Iraq, will recognize that such a buildup is a serious threat. 

The Distribution of Military Capabilities (rDMC) dataset is a catalog of over 18,000 types of military equipment spanning 173 countries from 1970–2014. This data is sourced from the IISS Military Balance and organized into a machine-readable format, which may be downloaded.