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The Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College publishes national security and strategic research and analysis which serves to influence policy debate and bridge the gap between Military and Academia.

Dr. Jeffrey Record

Phone: (717) 245-4080
Email Dr. Jeffrey Record

Dr. Jeffrey Record is a well-known defense policy critic and teaches strategy at the Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama. He has served as a pacification advisor in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War, Rockefeller Younger Scholar on the Brookings Institution’s Defense Analysis Staff, and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, the Hudson Institute, and the BDM International Corporation. Dr. Record also has extensive Capitol Hill experience, serving as Legislative Assistant for National Security Affairs to Senators Sam Nunn and Lloyd Bentsen, and later as a Professional Staff Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He is the author of eight books and over a dozen monographs, including Beating Goliath: Why Insurgencies Win; Dark Victory: America’s Second War Against Iraq; Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo; Hollow Victory, A Contrary View of the Gulf War; The Wrong War, Why We Lost in Vietnam; and Bounding the Global War on Terrorism. Dr. Record received his Doctorate at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

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Books and Monographs

SSI books and monographs by Dr. Jeffrey Record

Japan's Decision for War in 1941: Some Enduring Lessons

February 09, 2009

Authored by Dr. Jeffrey Record.
Japan’s decision to attack the United States in 1941 is widely regarded as irrational to the point of suicidal. How could Japan hope to survive a war with, much less defeat, an enemy possessing an invulnerable homeland and an industrial base 10 times that of Japan? The Pacific War was a war that Japan was always going to lose, so how does one explain Tokyo’s decision for war? Did the Japanese recognize the odds against them? Did they have a concept of victory, or at least of avoiding defeat? Or did the Japanese prefer a lost war to an unacceptable peace?
Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s

August 01, 2005

Authored by Dr. Jeffrey Record.
Anglo-French appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s has generated a mythology that ignores much of the actual political-military situation at the time and that continues to mislead U.S. foreign policy today.
Iraq and Vietnam: Differences, Similarities, and Insights

May 01, 2004

Authored by Dr. Jeffrey Record, Dr. W. Andrew Terrill.
The authors conclude that the two conflicts bear little comparison. They also conclude, however, that failed U.S. state-building in Vietnam and the impact of declining domestic political support for U.S. war aims in Vietnam are issues pertinent to current U.S. policy in Iraq.
Bounding the Global War on Terrorism

December 01, 2003

Authored by Dr. Jeffrey Record.
The author examines three features of the war on terrorism as currently defined and conducted: (1) the administration's postulation of the terrorist threat, (2) the scope and feasibility of U.S. war aims, and (3) the war's political, fiscal, and military sustainability. He believes that the war on terrorism--as opposed to the campaign against al-Qaeda--lacks strategic clarity, embraces unrealistic objectives, and may not be sustainable over the long haul.
The Creeping Irrelevance of U.S. Force Planning

May 01, 1998

Authored by Dr. Jeffrey Record.
Jeffrey Record examines what he believes is a half-century-old and continuing recession of large-interstate warfare and, since the World War's demise, the unexpected and often violent disintegration of established states. The author's critical analysis leads him to propose significant and controversial changes in planning standards, force structure, and defense spending.
Ready For What and Modernized Against Whom?: A Strategic Perspective on Readiness and Modernization

April 01, 1995

Authored by Dr. Jeffrey Record.
The U.S. military continues to prepare for large-scale inter-state warfare even though intra-state conflict is the primary source of violence in the post-Soviet era. Conventional "Cold War" force structures are of limited utility against irregular adversaries operating on their own territory. Accordingly, selected conventional force modernization programs should be reexamined and new force structures considered.

Strategic Studies Institute