Use of the Armed Forces Short of Sustained Combat to Achieve Foreign Policy Goals

Grant Year: 2018

Barry Blechman and Melanie Sisson will research and write a book examining how U.S. military forces can best be used to influence events short of combat operations. They will build a dataset of all instances of the use of U.S. military forces in support of diplomatic and political objectives between 1992 and 2017. They will analyze a sample of those cases to assess the degree to which the United States achieved its national security objectives over varying periods of time. They will also undertake several case studies of how Russia and China employ armed forces in similar settings.