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Gen. Larry D. Welch Deterrence Writing Award (Due 6/1/26) | Strategic Command Academic Alliance

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05.07.2026 at 11:58pm
Gen. Larry D. Welch Deterrence Writing Award (Due 6/1/26) | Strategic Command Academic Alliance Image
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Strategic Command Academic Alliance

Purpose

Develop an academic community of interest focused on research and analysis of deterrence, assurance, and associated strategic level national security themes in a rapidly changing, multi-domain global threat environment.

Goals

» Advance deterrence and assurance thinking beyond Cold War era narratives.

» Stimulate rigorous academic research into deterrence, assurance, and other concepts of strategic thought for the 21st Century.

» Promote collaboration among academic and military Alliance members.

» Encourage development of national security professionals to meet future research, analytic, and decision-making requirements

The Commander, United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) is sponsoring a competition for the best research papers on the subject of strategic deterrence. Participating researchers are asked to submit papers by June 1, 2026.

Submissions will be judged in one of two categories. The “junior” category is for undergraduate and masters students. The “senior” category is for doctoral students, postdocs, and professionals.

The winning author in each category will be recognized by USSTRATCOM, and each article will be published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Publication opportunity:

Requirements for papers:

  • Recommended paper length: 4,000-5,000 words. Articles substantially longer will not be eligible for publication
  • Citation format for footnotes/endnotes must follow The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed.
  • Please confirm your manuscript is not under consideration for publication elsewhere
  • Submissions must not contain any classified references or material
  • For additional information, please see the submission guidelines for Journal of Peace & War Studies or Joint Force Quarterly.
  • Failure to meet paper requirements will remove the paper from competition consideration.

Submission requirements:

  • Please include your full name, email address, current position and/or educational pursuit
  • Indicate if you are submitting for the Junior or Senior award category
  • Submit papers via email to Dr. Jennifer Bradley at [email protected]

A panel of defense policy experts will judge papers on the following:

  • Applicability to current deterrence issues
  • Quality of argument
  • Implications for future deterrence analysis, planning, and operations
  • Historical accuracy
  • Quality of writing and reference material

Research topics:

USSTRATCOM Analytic Agenda Research Questions

Focus Area 1: Security Environment

  • What are the strategic implications of a two nuclear peer environment (e.g., for U.S. policy, nuclear modernization, arms control, strategic stability dialogues)?
    • What is the role, if any, of parity in such an environment?
    • Does it change how we think about 3rd, 4th, nth actors?
  • What is the impact on U.S. strategy of increasing ties between U.S. strategic competitors? What are the implications for stability (e.g., strategic stability, first strike stability, crisis stability, arms race stability)?
  • Describe the potential implications for U.S. policy, strategy, and force posture of a security environment where multiple potential adversaries are increasing reliance on nuclear weapons.
  • How do U.S. perceptions of topics like warfare, nuclear use, deterrence, stability, and the spectrum of conflict compare to those of its competitors? What risks arise in the differences among these perspectives?
  • Given a rapidly evolving security environment, what are the potential risks to effectively assuring U.S. allies or deterring potential adversaries? Describe the “known unknowns” and hypothesize the “unknown unknowns.”
    • What may buy down these risks (e.g., policy, strategy, posture, capabilities)?
  • How might adversary perceptions of their ability to deny the United States the use of the electromagnetic spectrum for command and control, sensing, etc. affect stability (e.g., strategic stability, first strike stability, crisis stability, arms race stability)?
Focus Area 2: Deterrence and Escalation Maneuver

  • What are the escalation dynamics of simultaneous conflicts with more than one strategic adversary?
    • How might those dynamics shift according to the relationship between adversaries (e.g., adversaries cooperating, coordinating, allied)?
  • What strategies or approaches are necessary to deter multiple strategic actors simultaneously?
    • How might the strategies and capabilities needed to deter a second adversary change if we are already in conflict with one?
    • How might the United States and its allies shape the environment to enhance strategic stability among multiple nuclear-armed actors?
  • How do deterrence and compellence strategies evolve across the spectrum of conflict?
    • What strategic approaches or concepts promote de-escalation or restoration of deterrence?
    • What effects do non-nuclear capabilities have on escalation dynamics?
  • What methods can be used to measure the effectiveness of a deterrence strategy?
  • How might nuclear and non-nuclear integration enhance strategic deterrence? Extended deterrence? What are the potential risks?
  • What are the key challenges to realizing integrated deterrence within and outside the Department of War (DoW), and how can they be resolved, managed, or mitigated?
  • Describe and evaluate alternative restore deterrence strategies and operational concepts. What are the risks and benefits of responding to adversary aggression in a manner proportional to the values threatened?
  • How should joint command and control doctrine for the combatant command and its functional components be modified to accept and enable the envisioned Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concepts of real-time centralized control?
    • What are the electromagnetic spectrum implications of this shift and potential paths to address?
Focus Area 3: Assurance and Extended Deterrence

  • What is required of U.S. alliance architectures to address the growing momentum of adversaries acting against and/or subverting the liberal, rules-based international order?
  • How does the United States and its allies remain resilient against adversarial nuclear coercion?
  • How might the United States enhance the credibility of its extended deterrence commitments to its allies?
    • How might advanced non-nuclear capabilities or conventional-nuclear integration enhance the credibility of U.S. extended deterrence commitments?
    • How should deterrence efforts be shared or divided among allies?
    • What would be the consequences, especially to the credibility of U.S. security commitments and ally relationships, if allies or partners developed sovereign nuclear capabilities?
Focus Area 4: Emerging and Future Technology

  • What impact might advanced technologies have on assurance and deterrence?
    • How might technologies 50 years in the future impact the security environment?
    • What impact might these advanced technologies have on stability (e.g., strategic stability, first strike stability, crisis stability, arms race stability)?
  • What technologies or technological trends might lead to capabilities with greater lethality than nuclear weapons? Describe the potential implications of such capabilities. What are the potential impacts on stability (e.g., strategic stability, first strike stability, crisis stability, arms race stability)?
  • What are the potential benefits and risks of leveraging artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) or other novel technology applications for nuclear strategy development, nuclear command and control and operations, or nuclear enterprise modernization? How can risks be mitigated?
    • In what aspects of strategic deterrence can AI/ML provide the greatest benefits for the lowest risk?
  • What processes and procedures might accelerate the coordination between military and civilian organizations to exploit, attack, protect, and manage the electromagnetic spectrum operational environment to attain electromagnetic spectrum superiority?
  • What are the benefits and risks to deployed warfighters of commercial and military use of current and emerging communication standards such as 5G and 6G?
    • How should DoW design wrap-around technologies to enable these benefits while protecting against the inherent risk?
  • Describe the potential benefits of joint force and coalition force frequency de-confliction enabled by spectrum sharing technologies that allow unsynchronized simultaneous transmission over the same frequency bands by commercial and U.S. forces.
  • How might coherent electromagnetic attack or sensing between mission aircraft and unmanned systems improve the overall range of effects or detection against a threat?
  • How might electromagnetic spectrum-dependent systems leverage AI solutions real time?
  • How might campaign-level modeling and simulation capture the impacts of electromagnetic attack (EA), electromagnetic support (ES), and electromagnetic protection (EP) on the joint force?
    • To what extent would higher fidelity modeling of EA, ES, and EP of EMS-dependent systems result in significantly altered outcomes of current model success or failure metrics?

 

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