Recent Publications

Maneuver and Manipulation: On the Military Strategy of Online Information Warfare
May 7, 2019 — Author: Mr. Tim HwangView the Executive Summary How should the defense community best organize to combat modern campaigns of propaganda and disinformation? Without a broader strategic concept of the nature of the challenge posed by these techniques, current efforts and investments run the risk of simply chasing the latest tactics without... MORE

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Command Decision: Ethical Leadership in the Information Environment
April 30, 2019 — Author: Mr Keir GilesView the Executive Summary Big data amplifies a classical problem of military leadership, namely, making critical decisions based on limited and often unreliable information. This monograph considers three leadership models that provide an alternative to an overreliance on technological solutions to address new challenges... MORE

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Deterring Russia in the Gray Zone
March 20, 2019 — Authors: Michael C. McCarthy, Matthew A. Moyer, Brett H. VenableView the Executive Summary The United States lacks a cohesive strategy to deter Russian aggression. Despite being militarily and economically inferior, Russia has undermined the United States and its allies by exploiting the “gray zone,” or the conceptual space between war and peace... MORE

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Examining the Roles of Army Reserve Component Forces in Military Cyberspace Operations
January 31, 2019 — Author: Mr Jeffrey L CatonView the Executive Summary Cyberspace operations have become pervasive in the United States, and they enable many aspects of modern life for the average citizen, such as entertainment, communication, education, transportation, banking, and voting. The continuing development of the U.S. Army and Department of Defense (DoD)... MORE

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Maintaining Information Dominance in Complex Environments
October 3, 2018 — Author: Dr John A S. Ardis, Dr Shima D KeeneView the Executive SummaryThere are many risks to the U.S. Army’s command and control (C2) operations and to its intelligence and information warfare (IW) capabilities. The challenges include: significant uncertainty; sudden unexpected events; high noise and clutter levels in intelligence pictures; basic... MORE

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Strategic Insights: Revolutionary Change Is Coming to Strategic Leadership
December 19, 2017 — Dr. Steven MetzClausewitz famously observed that war has an enduring nature and a changing character that evolves over time as technology, society, economics, and politics shift. This observation also applies to strategic leadership: it too has an enduring nature and a changing character.The enduring nature manifests itself as characteristics that... MORE

Parameters VOL. 47 NO. 2 SUMMER 2017
August 28, 2017 — Editor: Dr Antulio J Echevarria II The Summer issue of Parameters opens with an essay by Sir Lawrence Freedman entitled “Beyond Surprise Attack.” Surprise, argues Freedman, can come in any number of forms, and sometimes those that come in the middle or end of a campaign prove the most decisive.Our first forum, Reevaluating Diplomatic & Military... MORE

Strategic Insights: Speed Kills—Enter an Age of Unbridled Hyperconnectivity
June 9, 2017 — Mr. Nathan P. FreierThis month, a team of U.S. Army War College (USAWC) researchers concluded a yearlong study on enterprise-level risk and risk assessment inside the Department of Defense (DoD). At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk and Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World argues for a new Department-level risk concept for describing, identifying,... MORE

The Rise of iWar: Identity, Information, and the Individualization of Modern Warfare
October 16, 2015 — Author: COL Glenn J VoelzView the Executive Summary During a decade of global counterterrorism operations and two extended counterinsurgency campaigns, the United States was confronted with a new kind of adversary. Without uniforms, flags, and formations, the task of identifying and targeting these combatants represented an unprecedented... MORE

Visual Propaganda and Extremism in the Online Environment
July 25, 2014 — Authors: Dr Cori E Dauber, Dr Carol K Winkler View the Executive SummaryVisual images have been a central component of propaganda for as long as propaganda has been produced. But recent developments in communication and information technologies have given terrorist and extremist groups options and abilities they never would have been able to come... MORE

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U.S. Governmental Information Operations and Strategic Communications: A Discredited Tool or User Failure? Implications for Future Conflict
December 3, 2013 — Author: Dr Steve Tatham View the Executive SummaryThrough the prism of operations in Afghanistan, the author examines how the U.S. Government’s Strategic Communication (SC) and, in particular, the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Information Operations (IO) and Military Information Support to Operations (MISO) programs, have contributed to U.S... MORE

Making Strategic Sense of Cyber Power: Why the Sky Is Not Falling
April 1, 2013 — Author: Dr Colin S Gray View the Executive SummaryCyber is now recognized as an operational domain, but the theory that should explain it strategically is, for the most part, missing. It is one thing to know how to digitize; it is quite another to understand what digitization means strategically. The author maintains that, although the technical... MORE