ABSTRACT The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and the China challenge, revive the question of whether the world is becoming more peaceful. Realists’ claim that we told you so compares oranges with cabbage. Today’s world is divided into a “zone of peace”, encompassing all the developed countries, and a “zone of war”, comprising less developed countries. Within the former, interstate wars, civil wars, and the “security dilemma” itself have all disappeared. The Long Peace since 1945 is widely attributed to nuclear deterrence. However, the sharp decrease in war had begun during the 19th century. The effect of industrialization is the greatest lacuna in IR theory. The Malthusian Trap that plagued premodern societies has been broken. Wealth is no longer finite and a zero-sum game. This transformation has made democracies as well as nondemocracies fight much less, and has sharply increased international trade. It underlies both the democratic/liberal and capitalist/trade interdependence peace.

ABSTRACT This is a reply to Frank Harvey’s critique of my article last year in JSS, which was titled: ’Rethinking Gore-War: Counterfactuals and the 2003 Iraq War’. This is part of an exchange between Professor Harvey and me over counterfactual methodologies and the Iraq War.

ABSTRACT Over the past 2 years, since the beginning of the full-scale war in Ukraine, there have been very few studies that have examined the war from the perspective of Russian military thinking. To be able to more accurately predict ways in which the Russian way of war and force structure may change, it is essential to study the Russian military scientific discourse on the lessons of the war in Ukraine. Taking for granted that the Russians come to the same conclusions as Western observers can lead to mirror-imaging and will ignore the likely prospect that Russian lessons learned from the war will not coincide with those of Western military experts. This article contributes to the understanding of Russian military thinking with regard to the war by focusing on three key aspects. (1) The evolution of Russian thinking about indirect strategy. (2) The changing Russian perspective on the concept of non-contact war. (3) The Russian military discourse about the challenge posed by the increasingly transparent battlefield of contemporary wars.

ABSTRACT This article reviews three recent books covering a broad spectrum of deterrence research and uses them to argue for a properly constituted field of Deterrence Studies. Having declined after the Cold War, research slowly revived after 9/11, and then picked up rapidly in the last decade with the rise of great power competition. Having been consigned to the academic margins for decades, such is the centrality of deterrence in international affairs, and the continued growth of multi- and interdisciplinary research on the topic, that it deserves its own field, rather than indefinitely remaining as a subset of other fields.

ABSTRACT Whether it’s the attack on Pearl Harbor, the outbreak of the Korean War, the start of the Gulf War, or the 9–11 terrorist attacks, the United States has suffered no shortage of strategic intelligence failures in its history. More recently, however, the United States has suffered from a different brand of mishap – a failure of net assessment, where the United States under- or overestimated how our allies would fare in a conflict against known adversaries. This article lays out two competing theories for why these net assessment failures happen – the missing variable hypothesis versus self-delusion. It then tests these theories against three cases of net assessment failures – Iraq in 2014, Afghanistan in 2021 and Ukraine in 2022. This article argues that contrary to popular belief, American net assessment failures are not primarily due a failure to collect the right information or an inability to assess the ‘will to fight’. Rather, American net assessment failures often stem from self-delusion. Because these assessments are often done at the upper rungs of government and include more qualitative judgements about friendly and enemy willpower and proficiency, senior government officials often shape their assessments to best fit their policy preferences. In other words, they fall victim to the confirmation trap. Consequently, if the United States aims to produce better net assessments in the future, then it needs to guard against this bias by professionalizing net assessment.

ABSTRACT I offer a response to Professor Joseph Stieb’s article entitled ’Rethinking Gore-War: Counterfactuals and the 2003 Iraq War’. In his critique of my book, Explaining the Iraq War: Counterfactual Theory, Logic and Evidence, Stieb claims that neoconservatives and right-wing hawks in the Bush administration were singularly responsible for mobilizing domestic and international support for the US–UK invasion based on fabricated threats about Iraq’s WMD and links to 9/11, Al-Qaeda and globalized terrorism. The central objective of my book (and this reply) is to refute and repudiate Stieb’s fundamentally flawed and simplistic ’neoconist’ account of the 2003 invasion.

ABSTRACT China is developing counterspace capabilities which may threaten US space systems. At the same time, its increasing space dependence encourages restraint in warfare. We argue that these conflicting trends have affected China’s counterspace posture in two main ways. First, China is bolstering space deterrence through offensive weapons, as well as more resilient and redundant space systems. Second, China prioritizes soft-kill counterspace capabilities that can be used earlier in a conflict with lower escalation risks. Our findings highlight how first-strike stability in space differs from robust to tenuous depending on means and targets, with soft-kill attacks being harder to deter.

ABSTRACT When considering drones’ impact on modern conflict, strategic studies scholars typically focus on the most sophisticated systems in states’ arsenals: costly and hard-to-acquire military drones, which are necessarily few in number. This article questions this conventional emphasis, proposing in its place that easy-to-produce and cheap(er) one-way attack (OWA) drones hold underappreciated war-shaping potential. Through analysis of recent and ongoing conflicts, we argue that OWA drones’ complementary characteristics are yielding tactical gains and can, under certain circumstances, generate strategic effects when employed against an adversary’s homeland. The findings show a need for scholars to further study the implications of innovative low-tech developments in drones.

ABSTRACT Will proliferated satellites enable a transparent battlefield in a way that might transform continental warfare? Many now think so. We argue, however, that anti-satellite (ASAT) capabilities will limit satellites’ potential contribution, but only if land forces adapt by deploying ground-based jamming and dazzling technologies. In a sustained measure-countermeasure competition, these non-kinetic approaches enjoy advantages that can deny an opponent effective use of space for battlefield surveillance. If ground forces contest the use of space in this way, the future battlefield will be much less transparent than many now expect.

ABSTRACT We apply Anatol Rapoport’s typology of war to reconstruct how Russian research communities explain war against Ukraine. We argue that the initial three-dimensional framework can be divided into two explanatory models: military-political and eschatological-cataclysmic. The first model explains the war with reference to classical calculus about military threats and national interests. The second model interprets war as an act of creating a new world order and as a struggle existential for Russia. These two models are not mutually exclusive, yet they illuminate evolution of meanings given for the war during the first two years of Russia’s large-scale invasion against Ukraine.