Faculty Publications

On 19 September, Azerbaijan launched an “anti-terror” operation into Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave in Azerbaijan that Armenia has occupied directly and by proxy since 1994 and in which 120,000 ethnic Armenians live. Azerbaijani forces quickly gained the upper hand. By the next day, a ceasefire had been negotiated with Russian “peacekeepers” acting as the intermediary.

With recent military coups in July in Niger and in August in Gabon, commentators have heaped blame on the United States. Last year it was a coup in Mali and two in Burkina Faso, and, according to The Intercept, “at least 14 US-trained officers have taken part in coups in West Africa since 2008.”

Major arms producing states and defense firms have struggled to supply the Ukraine war's massive demand for munitions. Key elements of the war—such as artificial intelligence-enabled analysis of data obtained from commercial surveillance satellites transmitted by the privately-owned Starlink network—have emerged from new providers as well as developed organically on the battlefield.

Remarks presented by our own Dr. James Holmes at Global Security Forum ’23, World Affairs Council of Connecticut, Hartford, CT, September 22, 2023.

The question posed by the organizers is: Will Taiwan be a tipping point in global security? Well, why don’t we start at the beginning and ask what a tipping point is.

In the immediate aftermath of the Wagner Group’s mutiny, many commentators and analysts expected that the Kremlin’s premier private military franchise had made itself obsolete. Such thinking only accelerated following the apparent assassination of Yevgeny Prigozhin. Yet, despite relegation from the Ukrainian frontlines, exile to Belarus, and the assassination of core Wagner figures, the mercenary outfit’s operations live on, for now.

While the health of civil-military relations has important domestic implications, including the overall strength and durability of our democracy, it is simultaneously important to consider how the status of civil-military relations at home influences the United States’ ability to promote healthy civil-military norms abroad.

On September 6, the United States announced it was sending 120 mm depleted uranium armor-piercing tank rounds to Ukraine for use in the 31 M1A1 Abrams tanks to be delivered this fall. In response, a Kremlin spokesman asserted that the United States’ use of depleted uranium “in the former Yugoslavia has led to ‘a galloping rise’ in cancers and other illnesses and affected the next generations living in those areas.”

If successful, in short, the B-21 will present U.S. and allied commanders the opportunity to exploit command of the air before winning it.

U.S. liberals have been in a defensive crouch for the past decade. Now, with authoritarianism on the rise, they have come under fire from those on both the left and right who want to reduce the country’s global role. In response, some liberal thinkers have looked back nostalgically to the early days of the Cold War, seeking inspiration from a time when robust liberal internationalism seemed capable of saving the world.

Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien spoke with Naunihal Singh, author of the book Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups, to discuss the spate of coups in the region, the origins of coups, what makes certain countries more coup-prone than others, and the rise and fall of anti-coup norms during and after the Cold War. We also dispelled several coup myths, including the myth of the coup contagion.

Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks set defense commentators aflutter last month when she announced “Replicator,” an initiative meant to field “small, smart, cheap” uncrewed, autonomous aerial, surface, and subsurface vehicles by the thousand within the next two years—all without asking Congress for additional taxpayer dollars.

Yevgeny Prigozhin is presumed dead in a plane crash, alongside Wagner Group’s co-founder and operational commander, Dmitry Utkin. They leave behind a business empire and thousands of security contractors in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The Kremlin has a few options to clean up the debris: they could completely disband Wagner, force a rebranding, or pursue some form of nationalization.

In this post, we examine the issue, concluding that while both views are reasonable, the latter is more defensible as a matter of law. In arriving at that conclusion, we scrutinized Geneva Convention III and related conventions through the lens of treaty interpretation rules, case law, scholarship, and State practice. Our views on the issue are set forth in greater depth in a recently published article in International Law Studies.

Endorsed! This month over at the Naval Institute Proceedings, coastguardsman Steve Hulse urges the U.S. Navy to procure a flotilla of Sentinel-class fast response cutters (FRCs) to serve as missile patrol craft.

Russia and North Korea are both fielding a novel type of naval weapon – nuclear-armed torpedo drones. These new weapons introduce a variety of strategic and operational challenges that further complicate a worsening threat environment. They also pose critical legal questions about whether their intended concepts of operation are lawful.