Recent Articles

By Colonel John Campbell, Lieutenant Colonel Emmaline Hill, Lieutenant Colonel Eric Medina, Dr. José de Arimatéia da Cruz, and Dr. Michele Devlin. China is quietly turning the world’s last frontiers—the Arctic, Antarctica, and outer space—into interconnected arenas of strategic competition, using a sophisticated blend of psychological, public-opinion, and legal warfare to expand its influence while avoiding open conflict. This monograph reveals how the Chinese Communist Party exploits the volatility and legal gray areas of these isolated, contained, and extreme (ICE) environments. Using the 2025 Fram2 polar–space mission as a case study, it shows how state power, private capital, and emerging technologies are converging in the polar–space nexus in ways that favor Beijing’s “active defense” strategy and threaten core U.S. national security interests. The monograph concludes by arguing that traditional U.S. diplomatic, informational, military, and economic (DIME) tools are no longer sufficient on their own and proposes a new framework to help strategic leaders compete and deter more effectively across domains in ICE regions without allowing great-power rivalry with China to spiral into crisis or war.

by Allison Abbe; The United States and China are prone to systematic cognitive and cultural biases that distort their mutual perceptions. Addressing these biases through cultural education and professional development is essential to overcoming blind spots in understanding the United States’ primary competitor. By applying dynamic constructivist theories from cross-cultural psychology to national security, this monograph builds on existing scholarship to reveal specific cognitive asymmetries between Western and East Asian observers. Differences such as holism, dialecticism, social inference, and perspective taking reflect the cultural lenses through which security actors perceive their competitors’ actions and intentions, but US observers often overlook the cultural factors shaping their own and others’ perspectives. Misperceptions between the United States and China raise the risk of miscalculation and conflict. To address this gap in understanding, this monograph draws on research in cross-cultural psychology, the literature on cognitive bias, and historical case studies, including lessons from US Army red-teaming and military culture programs developed during the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War. The monograph provides policymakers and military practitioners with actionable insights into how cultural cognition shapes threat assessment, intention judging, and perspective taking. Recommendations for cultural education, workforce recruiting and retention, perspective taking and seeking in practice, and long-term workforce development will help defense institutions sharpen the United States’ competitive advantage in the Indo-Pacific.

C. Anthony Pfaff; Fighting with Data examines how artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping military decision making by changing both the speed of command and the structure of cognition within mission-command systems. Rather than treating AI as a tool that merely accelerates existing staff processes, this monograph recognizes AI redistributes cognitive labor across a network of people, data, tools, and operational processes. In this new environment, commanders and staffs spend less time assembling information and more time interpreting meaning, judging uncertainty, and deciding how to act. This shift in the human role requires a new way of thinking about trust in military AI. Traditional standards based on reliability, transparency, or past performance cannot sufficiently evaluate systems that operate probabilistically and often opaquely. Instead, this monograph proposes an ecocognitive approach that evaluates whether AI-enabled systems fit the operational environment well enough to produce useful understanding and support sound judgment. Drawing on military doctrine, cognitive science, and epistemology, this study develops a framework for assessing representational, inferential, and adaptive fit in AI-enabled command systems. This monograph concludes, in the future, decision advantage will depend less on systems that can process more information than on human-machine systems that are designed to turn data into understanding under conditions of uncertainty. ©2026 C. Anthony Pfaff

by Frank Leith Jones; Focusing on the period from 2021 to 2024, this monograph argues the declassification and public disclosure of US intelligence in anticipation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—together with the subsequent sharing of intelligence with Ukraine during the conflict—have significant implications for national security policy making and military operations in future support of allies and partners. The monograph differs from previous studies in three ways. First, it examines public disclosure as a tool of strategic messaging in information warfare. Second, it serves as a model for intelligence sharing for both reassurance and operational support, with the latter highlighting the role of intelligence in war fighting that proved critical in enabling Ukraine’s combat operations. Lastly, the monograph provides insights into organizational adaptation through this major evolution in bilateral intelligence sharing. Methodologically, the analysis draws on historical materials, open-source products, official statements, and US laws and directives to assess US policy objectives in support of Ukraine through intelligence sharing. The study’s conclusions will assist US military leaders, policy practitioners, and intelligence professionals in calculating the advantages and disadvantages of intelligence sharing in future contingencies in which trade-offs between disclosure or sharing and risk, as well as between cooperation and constraint, are essential to decision making. ©2026 Frank Leith Jones

Edited by: Greg Kennedy, Antulio J. Echevarria II, and Anna Brinkman-Schwartz; Economic conflict is now a fundamental form of international competition, especially between large powers. Tariffs, sanctions, technological denial, supply-chain disruption, currency manipulation, and a host of other methods are now used daily, in both conflict situations and in supposedly peaceful conditions, to gain economic advantages. This collaborative study examines the phenomenon known as economic warfare through its past circumstances, present situations, and future possibilities.

The Academic Year 2026–27 Annual Estimate of the Strategic Security Environment provides a framework for those aspiring to tackle the Department of War’s most pressing challenges. This year’s authors highlight trending challenges and identify potential tension points across 10 sections organized under the broad themes of 1) Regional Challenges and Opportunities and 2) Institutional Challenges. This assessment represents the collective expertise of the US Army War College. The narrative is supplemented by a tailored list of 105 command-sponsored questions from 47 different Army and Joint organizations from across the Department of War. Combined, the distinct yet complementary narrative and question list offer unique insights into the vital matters impacting defense organizations and provide aspiring researchers with a necessary starting point.

Edited by Dr. Michele Devlin, Dr. José de Arimatéia da Cruz, Ms. Nancy Martin, and CDR Travis Pantaleo; Layout by Ms. Nancy Martin. The environment is the ultimate domain in which the warfighter operates. Whether land, sea, air, or space, Environmental Security is a defense specialty that better equips warfighters in the fight to respond to the unique physical, atmospheric, ecological, and human terrain of their operating environment. The Academic Year 2025 Environmental Security Scholars Program (ESSP) at the U.S. Army War College prepares students to become lethal and effective senior leaders in cutting-edge specialty areas within this field. ESSP team members at the Army War College conducted cutting-edge research on critically important projects sponsored by organizations across the Department of War. They participated in specialized courses on environmental security, collaborated with an innovative network of subject matter experts, explored remote regions, and developed essential skills to serve as senior leaders in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. This publication summarizes their research and activities throughout the year.

by COL Edward Kim, COL Cory Reiter, COL Charles Diggs, LTC Eric Giannaris, and LTC Robert Blome. The team conducted their research under the direction of Professor Samuel White (Faculty Advisor, USAWC). This USAWC student team, Project Leo (AFRICOM Futures), prepared this report answers a strategic question posed by Gen Dagvin Anderson, the Commander of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM): “What innovations will alter the balance of power across Africa by 2045?” The report finds that by 2045, the balance of power in Africa will likely depend not on any single innovation but on who can leverage converging innovations. The same innovations that might strengthen states will instead empower their rivals wherever institutional capacity is weak. Non-state actors are likely to exploit this convergence faster because they face fewer barriers to adoption. Five key findings frame the analysis: (1) non-state actors are building parallel governance, (2) service delivery, not warfare, decides outcomes, (3) state financial sovereignty is eroding from multiple directions, (4) China is building structural dependency, and (5) the outcome is still contested but the window is closing. The study concludes that the outcome is genuinely contested. But the window in which it remains is closing. The irreversibility threshold between 2028 and 2031 marks the point at which VEO governance roots, Chinese infrastructure lock-in, and African fiscal sovereignty erosion converge beyond the reach of feasible policy reversal.

by COL Joseph Kaminski, COL John Seitz, LTC Matthew Barwick, LTC Tanner Dunlap, LTC James Sye. The team conducted their research under the direction of Professor Matt Rasmussen (Faculty Advisor, USAWC). This USAWC student team, Project Quantum Advantage), prepared this report answers a strategic question posed by Major General Rhett R. Cox, Deputy G2 on behalf of Lieutenant General Michelle A. Schmidt, Army G2,: “What are the likely quantum sensing technologies that will shape the strategic operating environment between the United States and the PRC by 2035?” By 2035, the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are likely to compete in a strategic environment in which quantum sensing is likely to change the character of war by reducing the effectiveness of concealment. Quantum sensing is likely to make previously undetectable signals and structures visible to both US and PRC collection enterprises. This change is likely to undermine stealth, subterranean concealment, and low-observable operations. Five key findings frame the analysis: (1) U.S. likely to maintain Quantum sensing lead through 2035, (2) Q-PNT, RYDAR, and Gravimetry likely fielded by 2035, (3) PRC dual-use Quantum sensing likely to evade standard indications and warnings by 2035, and (4) ecosystem integration like to decide Quantum advantage by 2035. The study concludes that Quantum advantage is likely to go to the actor that commits to promising technologies, avoids the implausible ones, and best integrates the complete quantum ecosystem across workforce, manufacturing, data fusion, and fielding pipelines.