My research sits at the intersection of military history and political science, the philosophy of technology, and American grand strategy. A central theme is organizational learning and forgetting: why institutions — armies, states, firms — fail to retain and apply hard-won knowledge, and what this means for how we think about innovation, adaptation, and statecraft.
─────── * ───────
Books in Preparation
A Muse of Fire: Why the U.S. Military Forgets What It Learns in War. Manuscript completed; in conversation with publishers.
The Shot in the Dark: A History of the U.S. Army Asymmetric Warfare Group, 2006–2021. Under contract with the U.S. Army; to be published by the Center of Military History or Army University Press.
Peer-Reviewed Articles & Chapters
“From the Passion to the Hydrogen Bomb: René Girard and the Eschatological Problem of Technology.” In Be Not Conformed: René Girard at the Nexus of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley, ed. Luke Burgis. Catholic University of America Press, 2026.
“The Abolition of the Division of Labor in the Work of Karl Marx.” In The Concept of Work in the History of European Philosophy, ed. Gene Callahan. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025.
“Introduction to Special Section on Virtue in the Loop: Virtue Ethics and Military AI” (with Paul Scherz). Journal of Military Ethics 23.3–4, 2024.
“Atomic Signaling: Exploring Likelihood of Success and Military Necessity through the Bargaining Model of War” (with Joshua Hastey). The Review of Faith & International Affairs 22.2, 2024.
“Digital Voodoo Dolls” (with Marija Slavkovik et al.). Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 2021.
“Thinking Failure in the War in Iraq: The Cultural Turn and the Concept of ‘World’” (with Katherine Withy). In Why Philosophy?, eds. Diego Bubbio and Jeff Malpas. De Gruyter, 2019.
“The Triple Helix after Communism: Russia and China Compared” (with Harley Balzer). Triple Helix 3.1, 2016.
“Innovation in Russia & China Compared” (with Harley Balzer). Russian Analytical Digest 155, 2014.
Selected Other Writing
“The New Control Society.” The New Atlantis, Winter 2025.
“Technology for the American Family” (with Michael Toscano). National Affairs, Winter 2025.
“How to Free Elon Musk’s SpaceX From Federal Red Tape” (with Jonathan Berry). Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2024.
“Technological Stagnation Is a Choice.” American Affairs, Winter 2023.
“Common Sense on AI” (with Samuel Hammond). American Affairs, Summer 2023.
“How Gamers Eclipsed Spies as an Intelligence Threat” (with Renée DiResta). Foreign Policy, April 2023.
“Reality: A Post-Mortem.” Eight-part media ecology series. The New Atlantis, 2022–ongoing.
“With Finland and Sweden in NATO, the U.S. Can Finally Pivot to the Pacific” (with Gil Barndollar). Foreign Policy, July 2022.
“Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics” (with Ari Schulman). National Affairs, Winter 2020.
“How the Army Out-Innovated the Islamic State’s Drones” (with Kyle Brown and T. S. Allen). War on the Rocks, December 2020.
“How Tech Utopia Fostered Tyranny.” The New Atlantis, Winter 2019.
“Trust, Confidence, and the Future of Warfare.” War on the Rocks, February 2018.