Recent Publications - Tag 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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Standing Up the Strategic Competition Center
April 22, 2026 — In this episode, Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria II and Major Brennan Deveraux discuss the Strategic Competition Center, its mission and anticipated activities, and Echevarria's inaugural Strategic Competition Corner article... MORE

Decisive Point episode: Standing Up the Strategic Competition Corner

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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Weaponizing Risk: Recalibrating Western Deterrence
September 30, 2025 — In this episode, Antulio J. Echevarria II discusses how NATO might better leverage risk to strengthen the alliance’s extended deterrence. Can NATO increase the risks and costs of war for an adversary without unduly raising the alliance’s own? Can the alliance strengthen the credibility of NATO’s extended deterrence through a proxy strategy of “waging war without going to war”?... MORE

Slide for Conversations on Strategy Podcast Ep 61: Antulio J. Echevarria II, Weaponizing Risk: Recalibrating Western Deterrence