Strategy is Performance

I am an active-duty U.S. Army colonel serving as an Associate Professor at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, PA.   

As a military professional and political theorist, four objectives motivate my teaching and writing.

• I seek to integrate cutting-edge, scholarly perspectives on coercion, interstate war, intrastate war, and conflict termination into strategy formulation, military planning, and strategic education.
• I want to help national-security and military professionals cultivate political and causal literacy as it relates to military interventions.  Such literacy entails understanding those factors that affect the efficacy of interventions, and the various ways these factors might be causally related.  
• I advocate for an approach to strategic education centered on the ethos of "strategy is performance."  This approach means that we cannot become better strategists by merely reading and talking about strategy.  We become better strategists only by doing strategy.
• I aim to integrate a heightened appreciation for ethics as a routine practice in policy and strategy formulation...particularly when noncombatants' lives are at risk.

My research interests include:

• the integration of political science/political theory into military planning and strategy
• political, military, and strategic judgment
• military design (Joint and Army)
• military ethics

"The closer you are to science, the more possibilities open up; the more intimate your contact with first nature, the more surprises you get, the more unexpected agencies spring up, the more margins for maneuver you obtain.  Is this not the experience we all have when reading and writing scientific literature?  In science, when necessity comes in, it is possibilities that are multiplied."  Bruno Latour, Copenhagen, 26 Feb 2014