Military Strategy: A Very Short Introduction adapts Clausewitz's framework to highlight the dynamic relationship between the main elements of strategy: purpose, method, and means. Drawing on historical examples, Antulio J. Echevarria discusses the major types of military strategy and how emerging technologies are affecting them. This second edition has been updated to include an expanded chapter on manipulation through cyberwarfare and new further reading.

For decades, the rational actor model served as the preferred guide for U.S. deterrence policy. It has been a convenient and comforting guide because it requires little detailed knowledge of an opponent’s unique decision-making process and yet typically provides confident generalizations about how deterrence works. The model tends to postulate common decision-making parameters across the globe to reach generalizations about how deterrence will function and the types of forces that will be "stabilizing" or "destabilizing." Yet a broad spectrum of unique factors can influence an opponent’s perceptions and his calculations, and these are not easily captured by the rational actor model. The absence of uniformity means there can be very few deterrence generalizations generated by the use of the rational actor model that are applicable to the entire range of opponents. Understanding Deterrence considers how factors such as psychology, history, religion, ideology, geography, political structure, culture, proliferation and geopolitics can shape a leadership’s decision-making process, in ways that are specific and unique to each opponent. Understanding Deterrence demonstrates how using a multidisciplinary approach to deterrence analysis can better identify and assess factors that influence an opponent’s decision-making process. This identification and assessment process can facilitate the tailoring of deterrence strategies to specific purposes and result in a higher likelihood of success than strategies guided by the generalizations about opponent decision-making typically contained in the rational actor model. This book was published as a special issue of Comparative Strategy.

From the author of the classic The Wizards of Armageddon and Pulitzer Prize finalist comes the definitive history of American policy on nuclear war—and Presidents’ actions in nuclear crises—from Truman to Trump. Fred Kaplan, hailed by The New York Times as “a rare combination of defense intellectual and pugnacious reporter,” takes us into the White House Situation Room, the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s “Tank” in the Pentagon, and the vast chambers of Strategic Command to bring us the untold stories—based on exclusive interviews and previously classified documents—of how America’s presidents and generals have thought about, threatened, broached, and just barely avoided nuclear war from the dawn of the atomic age until today. Kaplan’s historical research and deep reporting will stand as the permanent record of politics. Discussing theories that have dominated nightmare scenarios from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kaplan presents the unthinkable in terms of mass destruction and demonstrates how the nuclear war reality will not go away, regardless of the dire consequences.

China's recent reforms have led to unprecedented economic growth; if this continues, China will be able to turn its great potential power into actual power. The result could be, in the very long term, the rise of China as a rival to the United States as the world's predominant power; in the nearer term, China could become a significant rival in the East Asian region. In this context, the issue for U.S. policy is how to handle a rising power, a problem that predominant powers have faced many times throughout history. It is the contention of this report that the future Sino-U.S. context will illustrate many of the problems of deterrence theory that have been discussed in recent decades; deterrence theory will be, in general, more difficult to apply than it was in the U.S.-Soviet Cold War context. The key may be to seek nonmilitary means of deterrence, i.e., diplomatic ways to manipulate the tension to China's disadvantage.