Commentary

At some point the war in Ukraine will end, and when it does, the resulting influx of mercenaries will send shockwaves through Africa. As the current conflict grinds toward its grim one-year anniversary, experts disagree on what might happen…

In December 2022, a Yemen war powers resolution was offered for consideration in the U.S. Senate. Bipartisan majorities in Congress supported similar legislation in 2019 but declined to advance the measure last year. What changed? …

Editor’s note: This is the second installment of a two-part series on the contemporary challenges to offensive maneuver based on observations from the war in Ukraine, and the implications for the U.S. Army. In a previous article,…

Vladimir Lenin reputedly said, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” The year of 2022 was exactly this kind of period, when years of developments were compressed: Lenin’s descendants ironically…

On Jan. 31, 2023, National Security Advisors and other agency heads from the United States and India met in Washington, DC for the inaugural meeting of the initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology. The previous day they had sat…

Few expressions in the maritime lexicon today are as persistent and pervasive as maritime domain awareness. The term has become a watchword in security and governance debates, a conceptual idiom implying information superiority in the…

Wars are much like Russian author Leo Tolstoy’s unhappy families. They are each wars in their own way. Historical comparisons can be simplistic and lead to false assumptions resulting from myopic thinking. There is no seamlessly…

The skies over Ukraine resemble an aerial version of the World War I Battle of the Somme. In contrast to the first frenzied days over Kyiv, neither side is attempting to penetrate deep into the other’s airspace. Much like the machine guns…

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s 60th birthday on Dec. 21, 1939, marked the nadir of the Red Army’s military campaign in Finland. A few weeks earlier, the party head of the Leningrad District, Andrei Zhdanov, had boasted he would personally…

Editor’s Note: This is the introductory essay for Volume 6, Issue 1 of the Texas National Security Review, our sister publication. Be sure to read the entire issue. Scholars — especially those whose work is read by policymakers — should…