Welcome! I am the Raphael Dorman-Helen Starbuck Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I am also a member of the Security Studies Program. In addition, I serve as a Non-Resident Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, and as a series editor for Cornell Studies in Security Affairs at Cornell University Press. My work examines nuclear deterrence and escalation, civil-military relations, military strategy and operations, and defense policy, with a particular focus on security issues in Asia and the Persian Gulf. I am author of the award-winning book, The Dictator's Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes (Cornell University Press, 2015), as well as co-author of U.S. Defense Politics: The Origins of Security Policy, now in its fourth edition (Routledge, 2021). Outside of academia, I served during 2023-5 as a member of the Defense Policy Board at the U.S. Department of Defense.
Header image: children playing on a captured M41 in Hue, Vietnam