Forty Years of Goldwater-Nichols
Forty years ago this month, President Ronald Reagan signed the Goldwater-Nichols Act into law, dramatically reforming the way the US militar...
Radio and PodcastLive Radio & PodcastsNews & Politics
Modern War Institute
The Modern War Institute podcast is the flagship podcast of the Modern War Institute at West Point. Featured guests include senior military and defense leaders, scholars, and others who disc...
Episodes
20 of 238 episodesThe MWI Book Club
An Army that reads is an Army better prepared to fight and win its nation’s wars. When the stakes on the battlefield are life and death, vic...
Operation Vivaldi
For years now, the war in Ukraine has been fought on a largely static battlefield—characterized by attrition, with little opportunity for ma...
How Commanders Win Wars
How did George Washington overcome virtually every material disadvantage to defeat the British during the Revolutionary War? How did Ulysses...
NATO's Ankara Summit
NATO just wrapped up its 2026 summit in Ankara, Turkey. Over two days of meetings and other events, the leaders of the alliance's thirty-two...
Logistics, Landpower, and Large-Scale Combat
For years of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, US Army forces, along with their joint and coalition counterparts, benefits from a...
The Future of the All-Volunteer Force
In 1973, the US military took an enormously consequential step when it adopted an all-volunteer force model. That decision has produced the...
Putin’s Intelligence Services
Shortly after taking power in Moscow, Vladimir Putin began consolidating his authority over the Russian intelligence services that had long...
The Weapons Defining the Iran Conflict
For more than a week, the United States and Israel have struck a wide range of targets in Iran with air and missile strikes. Iran’s response...
The Iran Conflict's Strategic Dimension
What were the strategic calculations that drove the United States and Israel to launch a military operation aimed at a wide range of targets...
What to Make of the New National Defense Strategy
The United States has a new National Defense Strategy. Released about every four years, the document offers a window into the way senior def...
Analyzing Operation Absolute Resolve
Examined exclusively as a military operation, the US raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was a stunning success. In the c...
Training, Education, and the Modern Battlefield
Both training and education have always been key elements of the US Army’s readiness. But as new battlefield challenges arise and new techno...
Europe's Airspace Violations and the Counterdrone Challenge
Late on the night of September 9, twenty-one medium-sized, fixed-wing drones entered Poland’s airspace. Several were shot down, while others...
The Military Technological Arms Race in Ukraine
Almost since the very beginning the war in Ukraine triggered by Russia’s invasion in February 2022, the conflict took on characteristics of...
China's Strategic Competition with the United States
The United States is engaged in a strategic competition with China. On issues ranging from Taiwan's security to the question of which countr...
The Army and Tomorrow's Technologies
The US Army is in a period of transformation. And much of that transformation centers on technology—from artificial intelligence and robotic...
The US Military's Critical Minerals Challenge
The US government established the National Defense Stockpile in 1939 to ensure that in the event of a major conflict, there would be enough...
Bunker Busters and B-2s
When the United States conducted Operation Midnight Hammer, a series of strikes against Iranian nuclear targets, it did so with two key piec...
The US Defense Industrial Base, from Steel to Software
The defense industrial base is a critical component of US military readiness. But how should we conceptualize it in the information age, whe...