War On The Rocks

China’s 2024 Joint Sword exercises, and more recent Strait Thunder-2025A exercise, awakened the public psyche to the reality that the People’s Liberation Army is not just training, but rehearsing to blockade Taiwan. Such a blockade would…

Iskander Rehman, Iron Imperator: Roman Grand Strategy Under Tiberius (Bokförlaget Stolpe, 2024) In AD 9, three Roman legions suffered a massacre in a region of Germania undergoing pacification. In the years that followed several attempts…

Editor’s Note: This is part of a new series of essays entitled “Battle Studies,” which seeks, through the study of military history, to demonstrate how past lessons about strategy, operations, and tactics apply to current defense…

March 16, 1968, is one of the darkest days in U.S. military history. On that day, the soldiers of C Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, who had suffered dozens of casualties in the campaign against the Viet Cong, assaulted the…

<!-- category --> May 8, 2025 In 1975, the New York Times reported on a growing number of transmission problems in Pontiacs, Buicks, Cadillacs, and several other General Motors cars. The source of the trouble was a recent law…

From Elon Musk to Sen. Bernie Sanders, there is widespread agreement that the Department of Defense is way too slow in how it develops, acquires, deploys, maintains, and upgrades technology. However, the analysis behind this agreement often…

We are sharing a free episode of Thinking the Unthinkable with you all due to fast-moving events between India and Pakistan. This episode features host Ankit Panda and guest Sameer Lalwani discussing the risks involved…

<!-- category --> May 7, 2025 In 2019, Michael Bustamente of the University of Miami was critical of the first Trump administration’s maximalist approach toward Cuba. Six years on, as successive presidential administrations have…

A few years ago, a young U.S. military officer asked me a pointed question: “Do you think we’re getting too soft?” I paused, not because I didn’t have an answer, but because I knew the weight behind his words. My answer was yes. The U.S.…

On April 9, President Donald Trump signed a new executive order aimed at boosting the country’s shipbuilding capacity. Some members of Congress also are seeking to promote U.S. shipbuilding, including re-introducing the Shipbuilding and…