Dissertation: Strategies of Military Capability Revelation
How do states decide whether and how to reveal information about novel military technologies to their security rivals in the context of peacetime competition? In weighing the decision to reveal novel conventional and nuclear capabilities, security elites face a tradeoff: while hiding information about new weapons retains the possibility of generating surprise, it sacrifices potential deterrence, bargaining , and prestige-based benefits of signaled military power. In explaining varied capability revelation behavior, I argue that states select from five signaling strategies: hiding, in which the state conceals an emerging technology to maintain secrecy; obscuring, in which the state reveals limited information to cloak technologies in uncertainty; alarming, in which the state exaggerates relative technological weaknesses; swaggering, in which states exaggerates relative technological strengths; and disclosing, in which the state reveals transparent information about an emerging technology. I then propose a theory that explains why states select one strategy over another. I test my theory through in-depth comparative case-studies, archival research, and elite interviewing.
Current Projects
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Nuclear Security
In several working papers, I explore the role of nuclear weapons in global politics. In a first working paper, I evaluate the role of status and prestige-based drivers of nuclear proliferation and post-acquisition behavior, comparing the nuclear politics of Britain and France during the Cold War. In a second working paper, I evaluate how new nuclear weapon states navigate periods of heightened strategic vulnerability between acquisition of the bomb and achieving credible second-strike capabilities.
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Military Innovation and Wartime Learning
With a co-author (Wright Smith), we ask how militaries learn from the wartime experiences of others (whether friend or foe) and make adaptations. Through a study of British and American military intelligence of RAF and Luftwaffe efforts during the early air campaigns of the Second World War (1939-1941), we propose a theory to explain varied wartime learning. A version of this paper won the graduate semifinalist award for the Bobby Inman Award for Student Scholarship at the University of Texas Austin’s Intelligence Studies Project.
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Campaign Analysis and Military Effectiveness
In a working paper, published in short form through the Center for Strategic and International Studies, I conduct a campaign analysis of a notional U.S. anti-submarine warfare campaign in the Arctic Ocean and Barents Sea. In addition to evaluating the vulnerability of SSBNs, I also explore the possible operational consequences of climate change (in particular, a rapidly melting Arctic icecap) for such a campaign.