Welcome to the Spring 2025 issue of Parameters. The issue consists of an In Focus special commentary, three forums (Russia, Ukraine, and NATO; Strategic Competition and Managing National Security; and Joint Sustainment Strategies), and the regular Civil-Military Relations Corner.
In our In Focus forum special commentary, “Soldiering and Silences: Witnessing Child Sexual Abuse in Afghanistan,” Caroline Kennedy-Pipe and Martin Thorp draw on interviews with United Kingdom veterans of the Afghan war to offer a new interpretation of war trauma based on the effects of witnessing sexual abuse by military partners.
The first forum, Russia, Ukraine, and NATO, features three articles. In the first of these, “Ukraine’s Not-So-Whole-of-Society at War: Force Generation in Modern Developed Societies,” Ilmari Käihkö and Jan Willem Honig argue that Ukraine offers a cautionary tale for national force generation, both for the professional high-tech war and the whole-of-society war approaches. They examine how both models are problematic and raise fundamental issues about force generation and sustainability that should inform NATO. In the second, “Russian Novel Nuclear Weapons and War-Fighting Capabilities,” Spenser Warren uses publicly available assessments to evaluate Russia’s novel nuclear-capable weapons individually and collectively alongside Russian war-fighting concepts to determine their possible impact on war fighting, deterrence, and arms control. The third article, “Measuring Interoperability Within NATO: Adapted Off-the-Shelf Tool or Bespoke Solution?” John Deni, Matthew MacLeod, Sarah Stewart, Katherine Banko, and Adrian Jones confront NATO’s lack of a common interoperability measurement and assessment tool and question what a standard would involve and whether NATO could draw on an existing tool.
The second forum, Strategic Competition and Managing National Security, contains two articles. In the first, “Adapting US Defense Strategy to Great-Power Competition,” Ionut Popescu outlines the trade-offs involved in competing defense planning priorities and argues for developing a US military strategy, doctrine, and force structure optimized for the needs of the great-power competition era—in other words, a great-power competition–oriented defense strategy. The second article, “Tyranny of the Inbox: Managing the US National Security Agenda,” Neil Snyder uses a novel data set to analyze the frequency with which contemporaneous crises are discussed at National Security Council meetings and claims that crisis management attenuates the council’s attention. The article concludes that presidents focus on crises at the expense of other strategic matters.
The third forum, Joint Sustainment Strategies, showcases two articles. In “Bridging Sky and Sea: Joint Strategies for Medical Evacuation in the Indo-Pacific,” Mahdi Al-Husseini, Samuel Diehl, and Samuel Fricks contend 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. In the second article, “Deploying and Supplying the Joint Force from a Contested Homeland,” Bruce Busler argues that the United States must prepare for “the fight to get to the fight,” focusing on deploying and sustaining military forces from a contested homeland amid near-peer threats. He provides actionable insights into fortifying logistics systems crucial for strategic mobility and operational success, ensuring readiness and deterrence in contested environments.
The Spring issue concludes with the Civil-Military Relations Corner. In “Civil-Military Relations and Democratic Backsliding,” Carrie Lee identifies a gap in the field of civil-military relations: the relationship between the military and the quality of a democracy. ~AJE