Brandon Valeriano, PhD

The astounding thing about prominent IR voices is how often they are consistently wrong, and never pay the price for their very public failures, instead doubling down each time.

Neat new Generative AI paper by Jensen and his team, looks great
"All models exhibit some degree of country-specific biases, often recommending less escalatory and interventionist actions for China and Russia compared to the United States and the United Kingdom."
arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06263

DoD Minerva grant on space/cyberspace nexus canceled. What is worse is how they did it, for a minute there we thought it might survive but instead they were just going down the list slowly...

Drones Now Rule the Battlefield in the Ukraine-Russia War Drones have changed the war in Ukraine, with soldiers adapting off-the-shelf models and swarming the front lines.

Incredible headline but the hubris to say this when EW jamming has forced a shift to fiber which now leads to new shifts (cutting drones, new optical sights, universal fiber platforms)
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

We officially have a know-nothing team working cyber. There is no offense/defense in cyber and you don't let your guard down while trying to poke the enemy - even Jake Paul knows that...

Hegseth Orders Pentagon to Stop Offensive Cyberoperations Against Russia The defense secretary’s instructions, which were given before President Trump’s blowup with the Ukrainian president, are apparently part of an effort to draw Russia into talks on the war.

Guess I should react but this is obviously grossly horrific. The thing that gets me is the idea we cut off offensive operations, offense/defense language is inadequate in cyber and most troubling is stopping basic monitoring of malware and ransomware.
www.nytimes.com/2025/03/02/u...

As academics have been saying for nearly a decade, cyber is a poor tool for coercion (Borghard and Lonergan 2017, Valeriano et al 2018) and useless to hold territory. Bigger question is why policymakers were convinced by hype beats and snake oil salesmen.

Impressive to lose Canada, France (probably gone before this), and Germany in one month.

Sure looks like my battle buddy and coauthor Ben Jensen

I think we need to go back to calling people imposters because the entire Executive branch thinks they can solve the country's problems by treating it like a startup.

What game/situation provoked this? Missed Metternich in Civ 7

1) Sure, they have better bread and bikes
2) Sec Pete just did, the whole purpose was to counter Russia
3) Kursk? UA protections? Reparations?

#Reviewing Sid Meier’s! Lessons in Game Design: Civilization and Wargames Constructing open worlds and the freedom to develop innovative strategies that incubate strategic minds or threaten authoritarian societies are the unexplored frontiers. The lessons in game design tha...

Been stuck in #Civ7 and its nice to be reminded that I once wrote a very personal piece about wargaming and Civilization 6.
thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2....

The real problem is that many restrainers will go along with Trump's military cuts because they have always wanted to cut the DoD. But you have to do it in the right way, not through some magic of technology that isn't even winning the current war. Get in the real game

Opinion | Reimagining the American War Machine The biggest challenge for any peacetime military is preparing for the next war.

This is a horrific, for one it provides no solutions offering instead do things faster. It adds, we can go lighter w drones buying into the hype of revolutionary technologies when on the battlefield they have gone wired within a period of about 3 months.
www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/o...

YouTube video by bbakkebb Coca Cola 🔋 MOMO

The world is burning and I need to post more Kpop memes. Two meetings, a class to prep, and a Champions League game to watch
www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nGX...

I reject the acronym DEI because it removes context and agency from the platform, eliminating the meaning of the program in favor of some anspectic term.

Academics need to stop applying fancy words to what is outright chaos and destruction. This is not normal, its an outlier, and its malicious.
www.lawfaremedia.org/article/pres...

Russia behind plot to plant bombs on cargo planes, Western official says The case is the latest example of a wider Russian sabotage campaign to disrupt Western support for Ukraine, officials say.

You mean like when Russia loaded bombs on planes bound for the US and no one said anything because it was during the election and transition and now Russia gets to keep Ukrainian territory too?
www.nbcnews.com/news/world/r...

And I am not a fan of the NFL but I sure watched a bunch of games this year because of *all this*

Trump to nominate Sean Cairncross as national cyber director Cairncross is a former top official at the RNC and previously led a federal foreign aid agency during the first Trump administration.

Good news, the NCD lives! I thought it might be slowly eliminated along with other cuts. Bad news, our new national cyber director appears to have zero cyber security background so its open season for the sham/scams in cyber security policy - per usual.
www.politico.com/news/2025/02...

NBA and Football (soccer), US team is really good

This is damning, but common. Orgs often downplay cyber security because it has little impact on their bottom line, but the reality is the cascading consequences for failure end up far downstream which is why the strategy of regulations, secure by design, and strong investment in the D is critical.

Ceci n’est pas une nuke? The impact of emerging militarised technologies on strategic stability Novel technologies with military applications are often implicitly viewed as significant threats to strategic stability. Yet, some implementations of emerging technologies may bolster defenses, mit...

I really like this paper and its something critically important, novel tech is often not destabilizing but stabilizing.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Me and most of the people who do cyber/social media/information operations from the academic perspective.

Institutional?

CLINICAL ASSISTANT/ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, SPORTS MANAGEMENT (Sports Diplomacy) - New York City, New York (US) job with New York University School of Professional Studies | 37787608 NYUSPS seeks a Clinical Assistant/Associate Professor of Sports Management with a preferred focus on sports diplomacy and international relations.

Really cool position in Sports Diplomacy, don't think I have ever seen this before
jobs.chronicle.com/job/37787608...

Elon Musk Says DOGE Will Dig Into F.A.A. Technology and Make Safety Upgrades His announcement comes after an outage last week to the primary system that provides pilots safety alerts in real time.

Oh ffs, if you had a plot to destroy America from within, I don't think you can top having the guy who bungled Twitter take over FAA Information Networks...
www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/u...

Would this be an "autohack"? Seems to happen alot around US elections.