Modern War Institute

The Modern War Institute podcast is the flagship podcast of the Modern War Institute at West Point. Featured guests include senior military and defense leaders, scholars, and others who discuss the most important issues related to modern conflict.
Book cover of They Will Have to Die Now: Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate by James Verini
History

They Will Have to Die Now: Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate

James Verini arrived in Iraq in the summer of 2016 to write about life in the Islamic State. He stayed to cover the jihadis’ last great stand, the Battle of Mosul, not knowing it would go on for nearly a year. This “urgent, scalding, hallucinatory work of war reportage” (Patrick Radden Keefe) takes the reader into the conflict against the most lethal insurgency of our time. […Learn More]

Book cover of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? by Graham Allison
History

Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydide’s Trap

From an eminent international security scholar, an urgent examination of the conditions that could produce a catastrophic conflict between the United States and China??—??and how it might be prevented.

China and the United States are heading toward a war neither wants. The reason is Thucydides’s Trap: when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one, violence is the likeliest result. Over the past five hundred years, these conditions have occurred sixteen times; war broke out in twelve. […Learn More]

History

The Fighters: Americans in Combat

Pulitzer Prize winner C.J. Chivers’s unvarnished account of modern combat, told through the eyes of the fighters who have waged America’s longest wars.

More than 2.7 million Americans have served in Afghanistan or Iraq since September 11, 2001. C.J. Chivers reported from both wars from their beginnings. The Fighters vividly conveys the physical and emotional experience of war as lived by six combatants: a fighter pilot, a corpsman, a scout helicopter pilot, a grunt, an infantry officer, and a Special Forces sergeant. […Learn More]

Computers & Technology

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War

The era of autonomous weapons has arrived. Today around the globe, at least thirty nations have weapons that can search for and destroy enemy targets all on their own. Paul Scharre, a leading expert in next-generation warfare, describes these and other high tech weapons systems–from Israel’s Harpy drone to the American submarine-hunting robot ship Sea Hunter–and examines the legal and ethical issues surrounding their use. […Learn More]