Engagement
Rethinking Reputation: When Fighting to Demonstrate Resolve Backfires
Joshua Schwartz
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
According to the conventional wisdom among policymakers and prominent scholars, states inevitably harm their reputation for resolve by backing down. In contrast to the orthodox view, I posit that standing firm and fighting can actually worsen one's reputation for resolve. The key theoretical innovation is conceptualizing resolve as a variable rather than a constant, which can evolve over time in response to a state's own past choices. Standing firm rather than backing down can lead to war-weariness among a country's public and leaders, undermining a state's actual resolve. Foreign powers -- observing these signs of war-weariness -- may then downgrade their assessments of the state's resolve precisely because of its decision to stand firm in the past. I provide evidence for this argument through an elite experiment conducted on members of the UK Parliament. The key takeaway is that policymakers and scholars should be more skeptical about the utility of using military force than prevailing opinion indicates.
Is There a Civil-Military or Political Divide to How Americans Describe the U.S. Military?
Neil Snyder
Armed Forces & Society, forthcoming
Abstract:
The U.S. military has been described as a calling, an occupation, a way to get ahead in life, a warrior class, and a family tradition. This study explores whether there are civil-military or partisan divides over these descriptions, cleavages that could be important to the broader debates on the civil-military divide and partisan polarization. This article presents the results of a survey fielded to a nationally representative sample of American adults to test whether respondents agreed with these narratives about the military. The results of this exploratory research indicate that most veterans agree with all five descriptions of the military, whereas less than half of nonveterans agree with any of them. A larger share of Republicans than Democrats agreed that the military is a calling, warrior class, or family affair. Altogether, the results suggest that Americans are divided over how to describe the military.
Technology, Behavior, and Effectiveness in Naval Warfare: The Battles of Savo Island and Cape Saint George
John Severini & Stephen Biddle
International Security, Winter 2026, Pages 156-191
Abstract:
What explains success and failure in naval warfare? Most political science research on military effectiveness focuses on land combat, often overlooking how behavior shapes outcomes at sea. This article uses a paired comparison of two World War II naval battles -- Savo Island and Cape Saint George -- to examine how material and nonmaterial factors interact in maritime conflict. In both battles, U.S. forces held significant material and technological advantages, yet they suffered a catastrophic defeat in the former and achieved a lopsided victory in the latter. The decisive difference, we argue, lay in commanders' behavioral choices, organizational structure, and crew proficiency in using technology under stress. Using case study comparison and counterfactual analysis, we demonstrate how similar material conditions produced dramatically different outcomes as a result of variation in nonmaterial performance. These findings suggest that naval combat is more sensitive to human factors than prevailing materialist assessments acknowledge. As U.S.-China competition intensifies in the Western Pacific, our analysis calls for greater attention to training, leadership, and doctrine when evaluating the implications of China's growing material power. Naval warfare is a deeply social process, and understanding its outcomes requires integrating human behavior with technological and material analysis.
Deception and Detection: Why Artificial Intelligence Empowers Cyber Defense over Offense
Lennart Maschmeyer
International Security, Winter 2026, Pages 86-126
Abstract:
Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to automate key tasks in the life cycle of a cyber operation. Many have predicted that AI will revolutionize cyber conflict by enabling offense automation for faster, stealthier, and more damaging attacks. But the revolution has not happened, even though highly capable AI models have been available for several years. This article explains why: There is a gap between defense and offense when it comes to the limits on what AI can do. Cyber offense requires creative deception to burrow into systems and produce desired effects before being discovered. Cyber defense, by contrast, strives to detect such intrusions before they cause harm. AI models struggle with the creativity and deception necessary for offensive operations, but they excel at the pattern recognition that is key for defensive operations. I show that this relative advantage of defensive tasks increases as the stakes increase. I test this theory against experimental and in-the-wild evidence of AI automation in cyber conflict. States that invest in defense automation will likely enjoy a growing advantage over those that prioritize investing in offense automation. Rather than heralding a revolution, AI automation is likely to further tame cyber conflict. Highly skilled human operators, not AI, will be necessary to avoid being detected by AI-empowered defenders.
Authoritarian Persuasion at Home and Abroad: The Partial Effectiveness of Foreign Influencers in Propaganda Work
Siyu Liang & Lachlan McNamee
Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
How do authoritarian regimes make propaganda persuasive? This study evaluates the impact of foreign influencers in propaganda. Social media videos and state broadcasts from countries such as Russia and China often feature sympathetic Westerners, yet their effects on audiences remain unclear. We conducted two survey experiments with 4800 respondents in China and the United States. Participants viewed soft propaganda videos in which either an American or a Chinese influencer described their feelings of freedom in China. The results reveal that foreign influencers did not persuade Chinese audiences but Americans evaluated pro-China messages more favorably when delivered by a fellow American. This suggests foreign influencers improve perceptions of authoritarian rule among their co-nationals, but not within such regimes. Our findings show how autocracies can build global support through foreign influencers, which, given heightened geopolitical competition and the emergence of social media as a dominant news source, has implications for democratic resilience.
Strategy in the New Missile Age
Erik Sand
Security Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Technological improvements have placed the world on the verge of a new missile age in which precision intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) armed with conventional warheads will become useful and cost-effective weapons against many targets. Among great powers, this development will eliminate the sanctuary from conventional attack that distance from an enemy has historically provided. Using Monte Carlo simulations of conventional ICBM raids on bomber bases in the continental United States, I illustrate the damage these weapons could inflict on US power-projection capabilities and identify cost-exchange ratios that substantially favor the attacker. While these weapons will have limited effectiveness in nuclear counterforce, they will shift the conventional offense-defense balance in favor of offensive missile tactics, with important operational and strategic implications, including heightening the importance of the reconnaissance competition between hiders and finders, more complicated conventional-nuclear interactions, and potentially undermining the military foundations of US hegemony.
The Cold War and the U.S. Labor Market
Ilyana Kuziemko, Donato Onorato & Suresh Naidu
NBER Working Paper, March 2026
Abstract:
We argue that the Cold War contributed to the inclusive growth of the post-war decades. On the labor-demand side, we isolate exogenous shifts in military procurement across states and firms. We show that military procurement increases manufacturing employment and reduces inequality. Overall, the 1950s-to-1990s decline in defense production explains roughly one-quarter of the decline in manufacturing employment and nearly one-tenth of the rise of top-ten income share. On the labor-supply side, the Cold-War-era draft removed millions of young men from the labor force, significantly reducing young male civilian unemployment. Military procurement also increased voter support for hawkish foreign policy.
American Relief and the Soviet Famine of 1921-1922
Natalya Naumenko, Volha Charnysh & Andrei Markevich
MIT Working Paper, December 2025
Abstract:
We study the effects of large-scale humanitarian aid using novel data from the American Relief Administration's (ARA) intervention during the 1921-1922 famine in Soviet Russia. We find that the allocation of relief closely tracked underlying food scarcity and was uncorrelated with subnational politics. We show that ARA rations reduced food prices, raised caloric intake, lowered the prevalence of relapsing fever, and increased rural birth cohorts. The aid benefited poorest peasants most and proved most effective in provinces with higher levels of human capital. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that, absent ARA relief, the 1926 population would have been 4.4 million lower.
The psychology of offensive and defensive intergroup violence: Preregistered insights from 58 countries
Jonas Kunst et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 31 March 2026
Abstract:
Evolutionary theory and historical evidence suggest humans possess distinct psychological tendencies for defensive and offensive violence, which have insufficiently been considered in research. In a large-scale preregistered study across 58 countries (N = 18,128), we demonstrate that violent extremist intentions manifest along two distinct psychological phenomena: defensive extremism, motivated by protecting one's group from (perceived) threats, and offensive extremism, driven by establishing group dominance. We show that these dimensions a) can be reliably differentiated across diverse cultural contexts, b) are distinctively associated with psychological dispositions, and c) systematically differentiate countries varying in macrolevel sociopolitical functioning and violence. Across nations, a two-factorial structure was observed that was invariant at the scalar level. Defensive extremist intentions were consistently higher than offensive extremism in 56 out of 58 countries, suggesting greater moral acceptance of protective violence. While psychopathy was positively related to both types of violent extremist intentions, those high in Machiavellianism and narcissism demonstrated particularly higher levels of defensive extremist intentions. By contrast, those scoring high on religious fundamentalism and social dominance orientation demonstrated particularly higher levels of offensive extremist intentions. Unexpectedly, liberal political group identification was associated with higher offensive but lower defensive extremist intentions. Crucially, offensive (but not defensive) intentions were associated with macrolevel societal dysfunction, including political terror and internal conflict. These findings establish that defensive and offensive violent extremist intentions represent two conceptually different forms of extremism across a large and diverse range of countries, with consequences for research and practice.
An Experimental Evaluation of Deferred Acceptance: Evidence From Over 100 Army Officer Labor Markets
Jonathan Davis, Kyle Greenberg & Damon Jones
Econometrica, March 2026, Pages 641-662
Abstract:
Internal labor markets are increasingly important for matching workers to jobs within organizations. We present evidence from a randomized trial that compares matching workers to jobs using the deferred acceptance (DA) algorithm to the traditional manager-directed matching process. Our setting is the U.S. Army's internal labor market, which matches over 14,000 officers to units annually. We find that DA reduces administrative burden and increases match quality as measured by reduced justified envy, increased truthful preference reporting, and officers' and units' preferences over their matches. The overall impact of DA on officer retention and performance in the two years after officers started their new jobs is limited by strategic preference coordination between officers and units. However, DA leads to significant improvements in officer retention and promotions in markets with inexperienced managers. Our findings suggest that cross-market communication between agents in internal labor markets can attenuate the benefits of strategy-proof matching algorithms.