Recent Publications - Category Strategic Competition Center

Closing the Gap Between Threat and Rival
May 14, 2026 — This essay explores the advantages and risks associated with leveraging interstate rivalry frameworks for strategy development and planning. Advantages include reducing strategic uncertainty and gaining efficiencies in some aspects of force planning. Risks include trusting the data and accepting the methodical pace of research. While US security documents typically describe adversaries as threats or competitors, they rarely acknowledge that the behavior patterns among America’s three current interstate rivals—China, Russia, and Iran—differ fundamentally from those of mere threats or competitors. This analysis will benefit defense professionals responsible for developing regional or global strategies and for directing war-gaming efforts... MORE

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What is Strategic Rivalry? Why Should We Care?
April 9, 2026 — The states most likely to draw America into its next major crisis or war are not unknowns. They are the usual suspects: The same handful of states that have threatened the United States repeatedly across decades. Interstate rivals have caused roughly 80 percent of history’s wars and the odds of any given rivalry ending peacefully are little better than a coin toss. Yet America’s key strategy documents since the 2017 National Security Strategy have used phrases like great power competition, interstate strategic competition, and strategic competition without acknowledging the essential difference between a competition and a rivalry... MORE

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Strategic Rivalries: How Are They Won?
March 6, 2026 — This article argues strategic rivalries—distinct from general strategic competition—are best understood as contests in which states prioritize weakening a specific opponent’s capacity to compete. It departs from existing work by critiquing the Joint Concept for Competing’s narrow definition and by emphasizing rivalry termination as a central but understudied dimension. Drawing on decades of international relations scholarship and historical datasets of interstate rivalries since 1815, the article analyzes how rivalries end and identifies strategic preclusion as a proactive approach for winning them. Its insights offer policy and military practitioners guidance for shaping competitive strategies short of war... MORE

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Reframing the Nature of Strategic Competition
December 17, 2025 — In this Corner, Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria II, professor of strategic competition at the US Army War College, critiques the essential concepts underpinning US doctrine concerning intrastate strategic competition. In this, his inaugural contribution, Dr. Echevarria discusses the shortfalls in the Joint concept of interstate strategic competition, namely, its failure to capture the true nature of that competition. A more extensive reading of the scholarly literature on strategic rivalry suggests the nature of strategic competition should be reframed to align more closely with the nature of war... MORE

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