Dec. 23, 2022

The PLA’s Strategic Support Force and AI Innovation

The Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) Strategic Support Force (SSF) is has a number of advantages that will allow it to help China achieve its aim of becoming a global leader in AI, including an environment that promotes innovation, its explicit charge for innovation, and leadership's support for “intelligentization”, but also notable weaknesses, including attracting and retaining a high-quality high-tech workforce, China’s inability to fabricate advanced semiconductor chips domestically, and the PLA’s limited combat experience and the consequent dearth of associated “ground truth” data. The SSF will be a significant player in the PLA’s adoption of AI, but the authors do not see it as playing a central role in the PLA’s overall AI innovation and development.

Aug. 24, 2021

Policy Roundtable: The Future of Trans-Atlantic Nuclear Deterrence

CSWMD's Dr. Amy J. Nelson recently wrote a piece featured in the Texas National Security Review, titled the "The Cost of Uncertainty: European Strategic Autonomy and U.S.-E.U. Relations," that was drafted for a workshop titled “Transatlantic Disruption” at Perry World House, the University of Pennsylvania’s global affairs hub. The workshop was made possible by the Shapiro Global Workshop on Geopolitics Fund and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

June 28, 2021

Toward Nuclear and WMD Fluency in Professional Military Education

This article is one of the first products of CSWMD’s first WMD Educators Forum, which provided a venue for dialog and served as an accelerator for teaching methods and learning outcomes for WMD across the DoD. The article draws on recent experience in creating benchmarks for education on nuclear capabilities and concepts, and suggests how this can be done for other critical aspects of the WMD challenge.

Dec. 1, 2020

The rise of the futurists: The perils of predicting with futurethink

In this paper, Dr. Alexander H. Montgomery and Dr. Amy J. Nelson explore probabilistic and possibilistic approaches to uncertainty related to AI, outline their potential advantages and disadvantages, and identify common biases that hinder good prediction.

July 29, 2020

Inevitable bedfellows? Cooperation on military technology for the development of UAVs and cruise missiles in the Asia-Pacific

Will states in the Asia-Pacific develop real capabilities to deter Chinese aggression? In this discussion paper – published as part of the Missile Dialogue Initiative research programme – Dr Amy J. Nelson and Dr T. X. Hammes examine the increased likelihood that UAV and cruise-missile technologies will proliferate throughout the Asia-Pacific.

July 10, 2020

Innovation and Its Discontents: National Models of Military Innovation and the Dual-Use Conundrum

Dr. Amy J. Nelson's Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM) Report explores variations in national models of innovation, as well as the pathways or levers those models afford in controlling innovation’s end product with a focus on dual-use technologies. The report uses case studies of both U.S. and German investment in artificial intelligence and additive manufacturing to highlight national approaches to innovation.

Nov. 6, 2019

The death of the INF Treaty has lessons for arms control

In her article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Dr. Amy J. Nelson argues that despite the treaty's failure, there is much to be learned from its undoing, as well as from the current state of arms control.

July 23, 2019

The INF Treaty: A Spectacular, Inflexible, Time-bound Success

This article discusses the changing dynamics that led first Moscow and then Washington to reevaluate the merit of the INF Treaty. It concludes that the treaty's relative rigidity may play a key role in its undoing and suggests that future arms control negotiations develop more flexible and resilient mechanisms of review, dispute resolution, and verification.