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Parameters | Spring 2025
March 20, 2025 — Welcome to the Spring 2025 issue of Parameters. This issue consists of two In Focus special commentaries, three forums (Russian War-fighting Capabilities and NATO Interoperability, Strategic Competition and Managing National Security, and Joint Sustainment Strategies), the regular Civil-Military Relations Corner installment, and a review essay. ... MORE

Book Reviews
March 20, 2025 — Spring 2025 Parameters book reviews... MORE

By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy
March 20, 2025 — Mike Vickers is an American national security legend. His memoir tells the story of how he earned his status among the current generation of military and civilian leaders... MORE

Civil-Military Relations and Democratic Backsliding
March 20, 2025 — Why do we think about civil-military relations? Civil-military relations impact strategic assessment, strategy and decision making, and professional ethics and effectiveness. The military’s relationship with society influences recruiting and retention (and, therefore, the sustainability of the force), defense budgets, and foreign policy preferences. Moreover, the military’s relationship with political leaders influences the quality and content of military advice, oversight, and accountability, and even decisions about whether and how to go to war. Civil-military relations, put broadly, underpin any country’s ability to make decisions about and support its national defense... MORE

Deploying and Supplying the Joint Force from a Contested Homeland
March 20, 2025 — This article argues that the United States must prepare for “the fight to get to the fight,” focusing on deploying and maintaining military forces from a contested homeland amid near-peer threats. It extends existing literature by emphasizing US Transportation Command’s role in mitigating cyber, kinetic, and infrastructure vulnerabilities. The methodology includes scenario-based analysis of adversary actions, leveraging intelligence estimates and modeling for resilience in transportation networks. This piece provides actionable insights into fortifying logistics systems crucial for strategic mobility and operational success, ensuring readiness and deterrence in contested environments... MORE

Bridging Sky and Sea: Joint Strategies for Medical Evacuation in the Indo-Pacific
March 20, 2025 — This article contends that the US Army should coordinate agile and expeditious Joint medical evacuation operations in the Indo-Pacific and develop novel capabilities to do so effectively. There has been limited discussion among scholars and practitioners on modern maritime medical evacuation tactics and techniques inspired by history and informed by contemporary threats. This article introduces three new medical evacuation capabilities and makes six recommendations to advance a Joint maritime medical evacuation operating concept. It provides a framework for medical planners developing evacuation systems in maritime theaters and justifies how and why the US Army should play a substantial role in these systems. ... MORE

Tyranny of the Inbox: Managing the US National Security Agenda
March 20, 2025 — Presidential management style, foreign policy preferences, and domestic political interests all affect the national security agenda. International crises, however, are particularly likely to garner the attention of the National Security Council. This article analyzes a novel data set of all the issues raised at National Security Council meetings from 1947 to 1993 and finds that contemporaneous crises are very likely to be discussed, but that crisis management attenuates the Council’s attention to noncrisis national security matters. The results suggest presidents focus on crises at the expense of other strategic matters, and they do so when political conditions favor crisis management... MORE

Adapting US Defense Strategy to Great-Power Competition
March 20, 2025 — American defense strategy must shift to face the challenges of the new era of great-power competition. This article outlines the trade-offs involved among competing priorities and regions and proposes five strategic pillars to guide the development of a US military strategy, doctrine, and force structure optimized for the needs of the great-power competition era. Without the strategic planning needed to align the Pentagon’s investments and decisions according to great-power competition requirements, the United States may fail to prevent an avoidable strategic disaster by not preparing properly for China’s likely military quest for regional and, later, global hegemony. ... MORE

Measuring Interoperability Within NATO: Adapted Off-the-Shelf Tool or Bespoke Solution?
March 20, 2025 — Despite decades of work on interoperability, NATO Allies cannot measure, assess, and build upon it fully and accurately. The lack of agreed formats or standards for collection, management, and the communication of findings have prevented the Allies from developing common interoperability measurement and assessment tools. Nonetheless, NATO could adopt extant standards, methodologies, processes, or tools to achieve its interoperability objectives. Testing this notion through use cases, the authors identify practical and conceptual hurdles to adopting an off-the-shelf solution. They conclude that the Alliance may need to create assessment standards, methodologies, processes, and tools from scratch, despite the difficulties of doing so... MORE

Russian Novel Nuclear Weapons and War-Fighting Capabilities
March 20, 2025 — This article argues that Russia’s novel nuclear-capable weapons will have a minor but real impact on Russian war-fighting capabilities in Eastern Europe. Using publicly available assessments, it evaluates the weapons’ characteristics individually and when taken together to determine their possible impact on war fighting, deterrence, and arms control. Additionally, it analyzes Russian war-fighting concepts to project how Russian strategists think about their use and how they might integrate them into Russian war-fighting concepts. The study’s conclusions will assist military strategists and policy practitioners as they plan for a potential regional war on NATO’s eastern flank... MORE