My Research
Dissertation:
“Disunited Fronts: Wartime Prioritization in Multifront Conflict
How do states fight multifront wars? Across history, the prospect of multifront war has haunted the minds of statesmen, and numerous wars have grown from a fear of fighting on multiple fronts or the opportunistic exploitation of an adversary’s entanglements. Fighting in multiple locations forces a state to divide its military, making it more difficult to achieve victory and increasing the risks of military defeat. My dissertation examines the options available to states to fight multifront wars, and seeks to explain why states prioritize different fronts, and why those prioritization decisions change. I use a combination of archival materials, memoirs, published primary sources, and secondary histories to analyze multifront prioritization decisions in Germany from 1914-1918, India from 1947-1949, and Israel from 1967-1973, arguing that prioritization decisions are based on the intersection of military logic and domestic political pressure.
Other Research:
Wartime Adaptation
With co-author Nicholas Blanchette, we ask whether states can learn and adapt based on the failures of their opponents. We focus on the case of the air offensives early in the Second World War (1939-1941) to argue that cognitive biases significantly hamper the ability to learn from an opponent. Using material from both British and American archives, we propose that optimism about future technological developments and the tendency to attribute an opponent’s problems to inherent challenges intrinsic to that opponent’s political or military structures caused members of the Royal Air Force and the US Army Air Force to discount any potential lessons for their own operations from the failures they observed of the German air campaign against the United Kingdom. A version of this project was named the Graduate Semi-Finalist for the Bobby R. Inman Award for Student Scholarship in Intelligence Studies in 2023.
War and Civil-Military Relations
Contemporary scholarship posits that international wars are unlikely to stress a state’s civil-military relationship, but there are a series of substantively significant wartime civil-military confrontations which are not explained by existing theories of civil-military relations. I argue that battlefield setbacks, by creating differences in how civilian and military actors perceive the likelihood of victory, contribute to wartime civil-military friction by exacerbating tension between civilian goals of holding on to political office and military goals of autonomy, legitimacy, and resources. I test this argument through two in-depth case studies of civil-military confrontations in the United States during the Korean War and in Portugal during the Overseas War, as well as including a brief description of the lack of a crisis during the Iraq War troop surge.