Recent calls to create a Cyber Force are only the latest response to the U.S. military’s years-long struggle to train and retain talented cyber personnel. In 2019, for example, an instructor at the Cyber Center of Excellence noted the difficulty of rot…

On April 2, 2024, Ukraine’s military struck several buildings in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Russia’s Tatarstan region. The strike demonstrated Ukraine’s steadily improving ability to hold targets deep inside Russia at risk. But it was also a …

Over the weekend, the Philippines and China, which have been locked in a tense stand-off around the Second Thomas Shoal for months announced an agreement to deescalate tensions. While potentially positive, we believe that the long-term risk of conflict…

Madeleine Albright once asked Colin Powell, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Nobody ever asked that question about nuclear weapons. Not using them is the whole point. De…

In the past several months, the U.S. Navy has continued to protect global shipping in combat in the Red Sea, the Port of Baltimore struggled through the Francis Scott Key Bridge disaster, and the Chinese Coast Guard and maritime militia conducted attac…

This is a special edition of our members-only newsletter, The Adversarial, where we provide expert analysis on America’s greatest challengers: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and jihadists. To receive The Adversarial directly in your inbox, and to ga…

“This is about winning a war. We don’t have time for some politically correct publicity stunt.” This is the typical response we encountered when proposing sustainable logistics and sustainment practices at a recent military exercise in Southeast …

Two years ago, on May 31, 2022, President Joe Biden announced in his New York Times op-ed that the United States would provide Ukraine with high-mobility artillery rocket systems. The op-ed noted that the White House neither encourages nor allows Ukrai…

The Islamic State today looks different than it did five years ago and is far more integrated now as an organization amongst its global network than al-Qaeda ever was. It has been 10 years since the Islamic State announced itself as a caliphate and mor…

The People’s Liberation Army is often described as “the largest military in the world.” But depending on who you ask and what you count, the details are murky and confusing. The deeper one dives into the numbers, the more complicated the picture gets, …