Peer-Reviewed Publications
Military Effectiveness and Naval Warfare (with Stephen Biddle). Security Studies, 33 (3): 325-47. 2024.
Abstract: Military effectiveness has attracted a growing literature, but this work has focused overwhelmingly on continental warfare. China’s rise highlights naval warfare. Do this literature’s central findings hold for war at sea? We explore this question by comparing patterns in naval and land combat via a new dataset on all interstate surface naval battles fought between 1649 and 1988. We find important differences deriving from the contrasting nature of the sea and land as military environments, which have made naval outcomes more sensitive to materiel, quicker, and more one-sided. But there are also important similarities involving material-nonmaterial interactions. These features pose important implications for policy on future anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) warfare in east Asia, the balance of investment in skill and materiel in naval resource allocation, and research on military effectiveness
Working Papers
Making AI Inevitable: Historical Perspective and the Problems of Predicting Long-Term Technological Change with Mark Fisher (Forthcoming, AI in Society)
Technology, Behavior, and Effectiveness in Naval Warfare: The Battles of Savo Island and Cape Saint George with Stephen Biddle
Works in Progress
Defining Militarism: Towards an Empirical Approach
State Capacity and Capital-Intensive Warfare: The Influence of Institutional Structure During the Anglo-Dutch Wars
Social Wars: Conflicts of Belonging and Identity Transformation
Simultaneity and Nationalism: Benedict Anderson, Walter Benjamin, and Spatio-Temporal Ordering