Changing Threat Perceptions and American Grand Strategy: Evidence from Maritime Military Exercises
Peter Dombrowski, Simon Reich
U.S. Naval War College · Rutgers / Sciences Po
Abstract
Military exercises are largely overlooked by scholars of international security, despite the fact that their planning, executing and subsequent analysis represents a huge investment of any military’s time. There are, of course, a few exceptions (eg. Caravelli, 1983; Heuser, Heier and Lasconjarias, 2018; Kuo and Blankenship, 2022; Malley and Wirtz, 2022) and a handful of enterprising scholars have even generated databases concerning some forms of exercises (eg. Bernhardt, 2022) Yet the study of military exercises remains inexplicably thin given their significance as a metric of national strategy and the wealth of analytic data that they offer on the hundreds of exercises that take place annually by militaries across the globe. We begin to redress this oversight within the conceptual and empirical space limitations imposed by a paper.