Our War Studies Syllabus
We're crowd-sourcing a 'war studies intensive.' Read it, hate it, send feedback.
The Defense Assembly is starting its own War Studies Intensive - a workshop designed to give early-career folks some perspective on national defense, run by our own writing group but crowdsourced from among readers, fellow travelers, colleagues and well-meaning nerds.
This is a project that will never be finished.
Some of us work in professional military education or come from a practitioners’ mindset and have noted a critical knowledge gap among the staffers and hopefuls of liberal democratic movements the world over. We cannot fix that by ourselves - but in the spirit of a true Assembly, we can develop a solution by acknowledging the wider expertise out there in the world.
If you have suggestions on how to improve our syllabus, OR have a critical mass of people interested in being taught one of the classes, please reach out to LiuAnKing@pm.me
Crowd-Sourcing War Studies
War Studies is an exploration of the phenomenon of war and conflict, its effects on the human experience, and the diplomatic, economic, social and political implications of it all. It is not about glorifying war. It is multi-disciplinary in nature, and many of our practitioners come from a more critical school of War Studies than might be expected.
We aim to teach the full 7-day Intensive among our Assembly members on a rolling basis, but we will keep adding ‘lessons’ as long as necessary that can be interchangeable with other lessons on the 7-day curriculum, or just to better centralize more readings and knowledge for self-study.
The WSI syllabus can serve as inspiration for other groups to make their own, removing and adding what they please, but we are also taking feedback to improve our own. So please, reach out to us if you have suggestions. Similarly, some of us are willing to do one-off seminars on any of the topics if there’s a critical mass of people interested out there who cannot find these sorts of classes for free elsewhere. What exactly a ‘critical mass’ means will probably be subjective (more than 2, doesn’t need to be as many as 30).
The syllabus is free and will always remain so, and the Assembly will continually add to it. It isn’t perfect, and as mentioned, will never be finished. That is the point, however.
The Syllabus
1-Week War Studies Intensive
Winter 202X
[Day of class] [Time of class]
[Name of university]
Contact: LiuAnKing@pm.me
Student Office Hours: by appointment via Zoom
Revised Sept Mar 10, 2026
DESCRIPTION
On December 15, six Bangladeshi peacekeepers were laid to rest in a ceremony at the headquarters of the UN Interim Security Force for Abiyei (UNISFA).
The peacekeepers were slain in a drone strike at the mission’s logistics base two days prior. The likely culprit was the RSF, one side in Sudan’s currently-raging civil war.
The PKO logistics base for the Abiyei mission is not actually in the Abiyei area itself – it is in South Kordofan State, Sudan. The peacekeepers that were struck appear to have been caught up in a much wider offensive the Rapid Support Forces have launched across South Kordofan since capturing and massacring the key town of El-Fasher in Darfur. One-way UAV strikes have been reported elsewhere in the area, including Kalogi and Dilling.
The UN Security Council was aware of increased RSF attacks and presence in the northern sector of the peacekeeping mission in Abiyei as recently as October. More alarmingly, UNISFA had repeatedly come into tension with the RSF over the latter’s creation of illegal checkpoints on key logistics routes that run through Abiyei into South Kordofan, and regularly had to argue with the RSF to tear them down. Even further back, at the beginning of 2025 the RSF had confiscated UNISFA-contracted fuel trucks and begun harassing ground convoys moving between the PKO logistics base in Kadugli and UNISFA Headquarters. In hindsight, this may have been an omen of the strike in December, as the RSF perceived UNISFA to be an obstacle to their upcoming offensive. They may have also believed UNISFA to be in league with the rival Sudanese Armed Forces, as they demanded Sudanese monitors leave the area of UNISFA’s mandate in May and subsequently abducted SAF-appointed members of local government that same month.
There is a lingering question about whether these incidents were appropriately understood by all sides to be indicators of a future crisis. The Security Council briefly discussed RSF agitation in Abiyei at their meeting in November, but it was not the focus of their discussion. UNISFA attempted to carry on logistics via air-route from Kadugli to Abiyei even after the RSF seized El-Fasher and turned their attention to South Kordofan.
What causes conflicts to unfold the way they do? How can one assess the decision-making behind events like the aforementioned Kadugli incident? What discrete characteristics are there to a paramilitary versus a military? These overlapping queries, whether one knows it or not, belong to a larger research design, which at the end should answer the overarching question of this Intensive: How is warfare conducted?
War Studies is the multi-disciplinary approach to understanding how war affects the wider system of society. For students in this intensive, 7-day workshop, War Studies will be the foundational, but not exclusive, approach to understanding how national defense is articulated and practiced in the United States and in other countries. By the end of the program, students should be able to dissect the above anecdote and come to their own well-reasoned conclusions about the conflict, actors involved, its antecedents and trajectory going forward.
This Intensive will be taught by people drawn from FP4A’s NextGen program familiar with professional military education, military affairs, and Department of Defense policy-making.
There are a planned 7 days of instruction (either online or in-person depending on interest), designed to provide a brief, yet critical, primer on War Studies for those that want to enhance their knowledge base and become conversant in questions of defense posture and national security. The final class is an exploration of various case studies, taught by different instructors, to cap off what the students have (hopefully) learned. Each instructor will deliver a different case study at a time/place of their choosing, students will select which one they want to attend (or they can attend multiple if they so choose). Each class should be about 1.5 hours at most.
Readings will be free and available online; a GoogleDrive folder for participants will have scans and files of those readings that are not freely accessible.
CLASSES
Student Requirements / Schedule
Class 1, Levels of War – Introduction to War Studies
Describing goals for the course, as well as introducing students to the interdisciplinary academic field of War Studies and the nuanced changes to it over the years. The lecture will focus on Levels of War (Strategic, Operational, Tactical) in the U.S. and non-Western tradition. Students will know what War Studies is NOT, just as much as what it is. One module here will define the distinctions between Peace Studies, Conflict Studies, War Studies and encourage students to view them all holistically as the foundational concepts for the modern-day national security professional.
(1) Required Reading:
a. Devereaux Essay on Pyrrhus’ Battles Against the Romans OR The Importance of the Battle of Cannae
b. MCWAR Strategy Primer_web.pdf (Pgs. 3-60)
(2) Study Questions:
a. How do you think War Studies differs from Conflict Studies or Peace Studies?
b. Why is it important for us to study war?
c. What exactly is meant by “winning the battle, losing the war”?
d. How might interpretation and understanding of “warfare” differ across cultures?
e. How does military culture affect how a military may view the levels of war?
(3) Optional Reading:
a. War and the Liberal Conscience
b. An Introduction to War Studies (Chapter 1)
c. Twenty-Five Years of Peace Research, Johan Galtung
d. Tao of Strategic Leadership (Pgs. 229-237 [Chapters 6.1.1 – 6.1.6) Will provide scans
Class 2, Operational Art and Military Theory
This class is meant to be a nuanced introduction to the high-operational level of thinking about conflict, and everything downwind from there: the ‘Way of War’ and why even terms like Operational Art signify the military culture and specific doctrine of a school of warfare. By the end of the class, students should be able to, at the surface level, perceive the difference between how militaries approach operations, define different types of operations, and what the implications are for when two militaries are thus studying one another. We’ll cover Maneuver Warfare and the Soviet understanding of Operational Art as contrasting case studies, and end with an open-ended discussion on People’s War as defined by Vo Nguyen Giap, Kaysone Phomvihane, and Mao Zedong, and what makes it military doctrine but not necessarily military theory (and why it can be argued the other way).
(1) Required Reading:
a. A History of Operational Art
c. On War, Introduction by Jan Willem Honig (2004 ed.) (will provide scans)
(2) Study Questions:
a. What is the difference between operational art and military theory? And military doctrine?
b. Do these differences matter?
(3) Optional Reading:
a. Snowmobiles and Grand Ideals (Pgs. 22-79)
b. Military Art of People’s War, Vo Nguyen Giap (Pgs. 1-118)
Class 3, Military Technology – Acquisition, Combined Arms, and the Revolution in Military Affairs
How to understand the effects of technological development on warfare? Students should learn about military diffusion and at least two of the major epochs in warfighting: the advent of combined arms, and the post-Cold War information Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA).
Students should learn about the interlocking issues of force design, research & development, and acquisition within the U.S. armed forces.
(1) Required Reading:
a. Memo from Office of Net Assessment Director Andrew Marshall to Secretary of Defense, August 1993: “Some Thoughts on Military Revolutions”
(2) Study Questions:
a. How does technology drive military innovation? Or vice versa?
b. How do different
(3) Optional Reading:
Class 4, Warfighting Domains
Getting into the nitty-gritty details of the traditional warfighting domains. Students should learn about what seapower is, why it is about more than mass firepower from gunships, and what it means to be a blue-water navy (or not). They should learn about the shift away – and back – to large land forces over recent years, as well as how the land force component during a bombing campaign can or cannot make a difference depending on strategic aims.
There will also be an exploratory discussion on new domains of warfare and why the words ‘defense’ and ‘national security’ seems to encompass so many different levers of government right now. The basic ones that must be covered – cyber, and space. The newest ones being written about – financial, economic. And then an exploratory discussion on whether there are even more domains of warfare that haven’t been thoroughly explored yet.
(1) Required Reading:
a. LPE-20-4-Multi-Domain-Operations-in-Context.pdf
b. Influence of Sea Power Upon History (Chapters 10 & 11)
c. Strategic Bombing Survey Summary Report (Pgs. 1-52)
d. Science of Strategy 2020 (Chapter 9)
(2) Study Questions:
a. What are ‘multidomain’ effects in a battle? Why is this so important to the U.S. military?
b. What are the advantages of having a large or robust navy?
c. What are the advantages and limitations of a bombing campaign in war? What determines its success?
(3) Optional Reading:
b. NATO’s Air War for Kosovo: A Strategic and Operational Assessment | RAND (Chapters 7 & 8)
Class 5, Discussion on Civil-Military Relations, and Military Culture
Covering all the angles on civil-military relations there can be and using the two case studies of the Union Army and Army of Northern Virginia as examples to explore. Military culture will also be discussed in this context, most especially concerning how military governments can induce a different kind of culture in their soldiers than a civilian government.
(1) Required Reading:
a. Culture of Military Organizations (Chapters 3 and 4) (will provide scans)
b. A Politically Neutral Military Is Not Always Obedient | Lawfare
c. Avoiding Praetorianism in Civil-Military Relations | Lawfare
(2) Study Questions:
a. Is it ever justified for the military to step into politics?
b. What gives a military its distinct culture?
c. Why is it important for there to be civilian control of a military? What countries can you think of where civilian governments cannot control or influence their military?
Optional Reading:
a. Battle Studies; Ancient and Modern Battle by du Picq
b. Culture of Military Organizations (Chapter 11)
Class 6, Intelligence
Know the difference between military intelligence and other subdisciplines of the Intelligence Community. Students, by the end of this class, should have an idea on how intelligence support to military operations matters in a practical sense, and understand the limitations of intelligence as well as indicators of serious intelligence failures.
(1) Required Reading:
a. JP 2-0 Joint Intelligence (Chapters 1 & 3)
b. Intelligence Failure and Need for Cognitive Closure: On the Psychology of the Yom Kippur Surprise
(2) Study Questions:
a. How can intelligence make or break a successful military campaign?
b. What causes intelligence failures?
(3) Optional Reading:
Class 7, Case Study - Varies
This is a more variable class that depends on the instructor. Each instructor picks a ‘battle study’ of their choosing and students sign up to take one (or more) of those specialized lectures. Each one should be different from one another significantly but not too confusing or obtuse.
(3) Required Reading:
a.
(4) Study Questions:
a.
We are always taking feedback on this syllabus, and will update it periodically as we develop our standard curriculum and thinking on what a progressive national defense can be.