Faculty Publications

In this conversation, Capt. [Tom] Culora discusses the value of directed student research, how the fleet can leverage hybrid research groups, and how to identify what is most worth studying.

The USS John Paul Jones carried out a freedom of navigation operation off the coast of India on April 7. The Indian government protested the move, saying that it violated India’s interpretation of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Late last year, Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged that his country would reach “carbon neutrality” by 2060, meaning that by that time, it would remove every year from the atmosphere as much carbon dioxide as it emitted. China is currently the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, responsible for nearly 30 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions.

In the waning days of President Donald Trump’s administration, a group of outgoing political appointees unexpectedly pushed through the acting secretary of defense to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a hotly disputed plan to split the U.S. Cyber Command from the National Security Agency (NSA). This idea is a contentious and recurring sparring point, emerging in greater public display with the second Obama term.

Editors note: This essay is the third in a series of eight articles, “Maritime Strategy on the Rocks,” that examines different aspects and implications of the recently released tri-service maritime strategy, Advantage at Sea: Prevailing with Integrated All-Domain Naval Power. Be sure to read the first article and second article. We thank Prof. Jon Caverley of the U.S. Naval War College for his assistance in coordinating this series.

Last month, the unclassified version of the Donald Trump administration’s Maritime Cybersecurity Plan was published to the White House website … and then summarily taken down, apparently relegated to the trash bin marked “last president’s stuff.”

Rebecca Lissner is an assistant professor at the U.S. Naval War College. Mira Rapp-Hooper is a senior fellow at Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center. Together, they are the authors of "An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for 21st-Century Order." It's an ambitious book that looks beyond the liberal world order, arguing that China's rise and America's weakness render the old order obsolete. So, what will replace it?

Despite the Pentagon leadership’s apparent wish that military strategy and operations will return to business as usual when a vaccine becomes available — a health security milestone that Secretary of Defense Mark Esper predicted would come before the end of this year — there are good reasons to question this optimism.

Do policy makers and those who design our grand national strategy really understand what a Navy is? How does the planet's premier naval power seem to have trouble explaining why it needs a navy, what a navy does, and how to get it ready for war? How do navalists set the table when it is time to define, invest, and assign roles, responsibilities, missions and who get what percentage of the DOD pie?

Though often disregarded as a “forgotten war” — overshadowed by the global conflagration that preceded it and the nation-rending counter-insurgency campaign in Vietnam that followed it — the 1950–53 conflict on the Korean Peninsula remade Cold War history, with aftershocks that reverberate through today’s crisis.

Donald Trump assumed the U.S. presidency in January 2017 with no government experience—a record unique among modern presidents. Observers on the right and left noted with particular alarm his lack of national security credentials and apparent uninterest in educating himself about international relations during the 2016 campaign. Only five days after taking office, the risks of this inexperience seemed to manifest in a special operations raid...

These doomsday weapons are the latest iterations of the new arms race.

Is this a problem for Washington?

What should America do?

Twenty-five years ago this month, the conclusion of the First Gulf War inaugurated the post-Cold War global order. Militarily, U.S. forces dramatically outperformed pre-war expectations. Diplomatically, Washington assembled a coalition that shouldered the financial burden of the war. Domestically, the American public rallied around the flag.