Publications
"Storming to Partition: Croatia, the United States, and Krajina in the Yugoslav War," with John Ashbrook
Small Wars & Insurgencies, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Fall 2009).

To many scholars and policymakers, “partition” offers the most efficacious means of resolving ethnic-civil wars. Others reject partition as a solution, citing flaws (both logical and empirical) and harmful international implications should such an approach become common-place. What has been missing from this debate is an understanding of how the process of partition unfolds. In this article we examine such a process, the case of the Krajina in the war in Yugoslavia, 1994-1995. The U.S. aligned itself with Croatia against Serbs rebelling in the Krajina region of Croatia. The culmination of this alignment occurred in August 1995 when Croatian forces initiated “Operation Storm” (Oluja) against Croatian Serb insurgents. Croatian forces effectively cleansed the Krajina of its Serbian population. Eager to initiate a diplomatic peace process, Washington welcomed the Croatian operation, and largely because of Operation Storm, negotiations at Dayton became possible.

Current Projects
Book-length
Strategic Success, Strategic Failure: Information Structures and the American Experience of Limited Warfare, in preparation.

This book develops a novel information-based explanation of American strategic success and failure in post-World War II limited warfare. Three strategic challenges constitute the book’s focus: avoiding third party intervention, building and maintaining international war-time coalitions, and avoiding or defeating insurgencies. The central argument is that the effectiveness of war-fighting and post-war strategies are strongly affected by a state’s information management capacities; specifically policymakers’ access to information from multiple institutional sources and the density of information channels connecting relevant national security agencies within the government. Cases studies include the limited wars in: Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Kosovo, and Iraq.

Article-length
"A Tale of Two Cultures: Political-Military Integration in the Vietnam War, 1964-1968," in preparation

Political-military integration in the Vietnam War followed a curious pattern: in the air war, the U.S. was able to tightly integrate its political objectives and military conduct, but in the ground war, the American military prosecuted a strategy that was both divorced from broader political objectives and immune from Washington’s influence. Under what conditions can leaders achieve political-military integration in limited wars? I argue that the nature of information management between the military and civilian leadership explains the pattern of political-military integration in the Vietnam War more completely than do explanations that focus on the organizational cultures of professional militaries.

Dissertation
“Information, Diplomacy, and Strategy: Balancing Avoidance in Limited Warfare,” Department of Politics, University of Virginia, 2006
Committee: Jeffrey W. Legro, Chair; Dale C. Copeland; John M. Owen; Melvyn P. Leffler

Presentations
"Afghanistan 2009: A Strategic Appraisal," Ethics and Public Policy discussion series, Government and International Affairs, Sweet Briar College, 14 October 2009.

Previous Projects
"Hypotheses on Operational Power, the Offense-Defense Balance, and War," paper presented at the International Studies Association annual meeting, 2001.

The primary goal of this paper is the construction of a set of falsifiable hypotheses on the relationship between the offense-defense balance and the intensity of security competition between states. The paper is divided in three sections. In the first section, I review the literatures on military strategic interaction theory, offense-defense theory, and preventive war theory, demonstrate their conceptual and logical weaknesses, and suggest means of overcoming these limitations. In the second section, I offer a new argument for the origins of war and peace that synthesizes the strengths of these approaches and offer the specific hypotheses deductively derived from the argument. In the conclusion, I discuss potential contributions to the study of the origins of war suggested by this analysis.