Book project.
Advising War: Great Power Influence through Boots on the Ground is the first book to systematically analyze how powerful states use military advisors to intervene in wars around the globe, revealing a recurring pattern of such intervention in conflicts from El Salvador to Ukraine. Military advisors are often portrayed as technical experts or covert substitutes for combat forces. This book argues instead that advising is a profoundly social and political means of managing wartime partnerships. Advisors are placed on the ground, dependent on the foreign military to operate and survive, yet tasked with influencing events on the battlefield and shaping a local military’s wartime transformation. Through shared experiences of everyday work and danger, advisors build relationships of trust with their counterparts, opening channels of influence over consequential decisions which can, under the right conditions, aggregate up into desired strategic outcomes.
Advising War combines original quantitative data on advisor deployments by powerful states from 1946 to 2021 with in-depth case studies of U.S. intervention in El Salvador in the 1980s and NATO advising of Ukraine from 2014 through Russia’s full-scale invasion. The book draws on new archival material, advisor documents, and over 160 interviews with advisors, policymakers, and recipients of advice, as well as fieldwork conducted in wartime Kyiv, Germany, and Poland. The Ukraine chapter offers the first systematic account of Western security assistance before 2022 and how it shaped the war’s opening months. Taken together, the evidence explains why advisors have a global presence in other countries’ wars: embedded advisors generate influence at the local level that aid packages negotiated in capitals cannot achieve on their own. By bringing the interpersonal level into the study of war and intervention, Advising War offers a new way to understand great power influence and why wartime partnerships succeed or fail.
Advising War combines original quantitative data on advisor deployments by powerful states from 1946 to 2021 with in-depth case studies of U.S. intervention in El Salvador in the 1980s and NATO advising of Ukraine from 2014 through Russia’s full-scale invasion. The book draws on new archival material, advisor documents, and over 160 interviews with advisors, policymakers, and recipients of advice, as well as fieldwork conducted in wartime Kyiv, Germany, and Poland. The Ukraine chapter offers the first systematic account of Western security assistance before 2022 and how it shaped the war’s opening months. Taken together, the evidence explains why advisors have a global presence in other countries’ wars: embedded advisors generate influence at the local level that aid packages negotiated in capitals cannot achieve on their own. By bringing the interpersonal level into the study of war and intervention, Advising War offers a new way to understand great power influence and why wartime partnerships succeed or fail.
Peer-reviewed journal articles.
6. "Balancing Acts: Why Great Powers Underprovide Security Assistance." International Politics, 2025.
5. "Irregular Warfare and Strategic Competition." Defence Studies, 2023 (with Kyle Atwell, Alexis Bradstreet, Catherine Crombe, and Luther Leblanc).
4. "Side-Switching as State-Building: the Case of Russian-Speaking Militias in Eastern Ukraine." Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 2021 (with Jesse Driscoll).
3. "Good for democracy? Evidence from the 2004 NATO expansion." International Politics, 2020 (with Paul Poast). See reprint in light of Russia's war in Ukraine: "Good for democracy? Evidence from the 2004 NATO expansion," in Goldgeier, J., Shifrinson, J.R.I. (eds), Evaluating NATO Enlargement, 2023 (with Paul Poast).
2. "Forum - Conflict Delegation in Civil Wars," International Studies Review, 2021 (with Niklas Karlén, Vladimir Rauta, Idean Salehyan, Andrew Mumford, Belgin San-Akca, Alexandra Stark, Michel Wyss, Assaf Moghadam, Allard Duursma, Henning Tamm, Erin K Jenne, Milos Popovic, David S Siroky, Vanessa Meier, Kit Rickard, Giuseppe Spatafora).
1. "Introducing the new CPOST dataset on suicide attacks." Journal of Peace Research, 2021 (with Robert A. Pape, Alejandro Albanez Rivas).
5. "Irregular Warfare and Strategic Competition." Defence Studies, 2023 (with Kyle Atwell, Alexis Bradstreet, Catherine Crombe, and Luther Leblanc).
4. "Side-Switching as State-Building: the Case of Russian-Speaking Militias in Eastern Ukraine." Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 2021 (with Jesse Driscoll).
3. "Good for democracy? Evidence from the 2004 NATO expansion." International Politics, 2020 (with Paul Poast). See reprint in light of Russia's war in Ukraine: "Good for democracy? Evidence from the 2004 NATO expansion," in Goldgeier, J., Shifrinson, J.R.I. (eds), Evaluating NATO Enlargement, 2023 (with Paul Poast).
2. "Forum - Conflict Delegation in Civil Wars," International Studies Review, 2021 (with Niklas Karlén, Vladimir Rauta, Idean Salehyan, Andrew Mumford, Belgin San-Akca, Alexandra Stark, Michel Wyss, Assaf Moghadam, Allard Duursma, Henning Tamm, Erin K Jenne, Milos Popovic, David S Siroky, Vanessa Meier, Kit Rickard, Giuseppe Spatafora).
1. "Introducing the new CPOST dataset on suicide attacks." Journal of Peace Research, 2021 (with Robert A. Pape, Alejandro Albanez Rivas).
Editor-reviewed articles and book chapters.
4. "Vladimir Putin and the Russian Military." in Russia Under Putin: Fragile State and Revisionist Power, edited by Andrew S. Natsios, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025 (with Raymond C. Finch III).
3. "Formal Theory and Proxy Wars." in Routledge Handbook of Proxy Wars, edited by Moghadam Assaf, Vladimir Rauta, and Michel Wyss, 2023.
2. "Defense Institution Building from Above? Lessons from the Baltic Experience."Connections QJ. 2018 (with Paul Poast).
1. “The Development of the Modern U.S.- Polish Relationship and Its Future Prospects.” in Projekt “Polska”: Silne i Bezpieczne Panstwo? ed. Anna Antczak-Barzan. Warszawa: Vizja Press, 2014: 255-267 (with Stephen D. Mull).
3. "Formal Theory and Proxy Wars." in Routledge Handbook of Proxy Wars, edited by Moghadam Assaf, Vladimir Rauta, and Michel Wyss, 2023.
2. "Defense Institution Building from Above? Lessons from the Baltic Experience."Connections QJ. 2018 (with Paul Poast).
1. “The Development of the Modern U.S.- Polish Relationship and Its Future Prospects.” in Projekt “Polska”: Silne i Bezpieczne Panstwo? ed. Anna Antczak-Barzan. Warszawa: Vizja Press, 2014: 255-267 (with Stephen D. Mull).
Working papers.
Did Security Assistance Work in Ukraine? (under review)
Great powers spend billions annually on security assistance, yet studies find these efforts often fail to build lasting military effectiveness. These studies, however, tend to draw findings from examining weak states facing insurgencies. I examine the case of Western security assistance between 2014 and 2022 to Ukraine, a more capable state facing a conventional military threat. Through a longitudinal case study comparing Ukraine's battlefield performance in 2014 to its successful defense in 2022, drawing on 125 interviews with Western advisors and Ukrainian recipients, I find that training reached 78% of Ukrainian brigades and brigade leadership showed uptake of NATO practices like mission command. Assistance nevertheless failed to achieve deep institutional reform. In contrast to findings from security assistance literature focused on weak states, tactical training can improve military effectiveness in stronger states without comprehensive institutional transformation. However, gradually increasing recipient capabilities through training may generate preventive war incentives. These findings have implications for contemporary cases like Taiwan with similar training programs aimed at deterring aggression.
Seeking Influence: Why Great Powers Send Military Advisors to War Zones (under review)
Why do great powers deploy military advisors to war zones? Unlike aid, arms, or advice provided at a distance, advisors require physical presence, which can generate escalation risks and domestic backlash. I argue that states deploy military advisors not only for capacity-building but also for a distinctive form of influence derived from presence. Advisors connect strategic incentives to local behavior through monitoring and aid conditionality, while also exercising interpersonal influence over consequential decisions inside partner militaries. Drawing on original data on advisor deployments by the United States, Soviet Union/Russia, France, United Kingdom, and China from 1946 to 2021, I find that advisors are deployed more often to partners with significant, though not extreme, foreign policy misalignment, consistent with an influence logic of deployment. A case study of U.S. advising in El Salvador, based on original archival evidence and interviews with advisors, illustrates the influence logic at work in deployment decisions and advisors’ understandings of their responsibilities on the ground. These findings contribute to scholarship on intervention, security force assistance, and the interpersonal in international politics by showing why states choose more hands-on forms of intervention and how they use physical access, proximity, and interpersonal influence to manage wartime partnerships.
Tripwires for whom? Evaluating the Effects of Military Deaths on Elite and Public Support for Using Force, with Paul Poast and Dan Reiter (under review)
What conditions make societies and their governments more likely to support the use of military force? A central idea from international relations theory, Cold War history, and foreign policy is that “tripwire effects” after a nation’s troops have been killed in an international dispute can make actors more willing to use force. Despite the prominence of tripwire effects, very few published experimental studies explore for them. This paper argues that foreign policy elites are more likely to experience tripwire effects than the public, because they are more likely to believe in the importance of international reputation. Using two pairs of survey experiments based on a hypothetical US-China naval clash in the South China sea, we conduct one of the first experimental tests on the possibility of tripwire effects in general, and the first to examine possible elite-public gaps on tripwire effects. We find persistent tripwire effects for both elites and the public, though elites remain more supportive of escalation than the public even after accounting for presidential turnover, partisanship, and elite selection effects. Evidence further suggests that the elite-public gap is driven by different beliefs in the importance of reputation rather than a desire for punishment, revenge, or informational differences.
Great powers spend billions annually on security assistance, yet studies find these efforts often fail to build lasting military effectiveness. These studies, however, tend to draw findings from examining weak states facing insurgencies. I examine the case of Western security assistance between 2014 and 2022 to Ukraine, a more capable state facing a conventional military threat. Through a longitudinal case study comparing Ukraine's battlefield performance in 2014 to its successful defense in 2022, drawing on 125 interviews with Western advisors and Ukrainian recipients, I find that training reached 78% of Ukrainian brigades and brigade leadership showed uptake of NATO practices like mission command. Assistance nevertheless failed to achieve deep institutional reform. In contrast to findings from security assistance literature focused on weak states, tactical training can improve military effectiveness in stronger states without comprehensive institutional transformation. However, gradually increasing recipient capabilities through training may generate preventive war incentives. These findings have implications for contemporary cases like Taiwan with similar training programs aimed at deterring aggression.
Seeking Influence: Why Great Powers Send Military Advisors to War Zones (under review)
Why do great powers deploy military advisors to war zones? Unlike aid, arms, or advice provided at a distance, advisors require physical presence, which can generate escalation risks and domestic backlash. I argue that states deploy military advisors not only for capacity-building but also for a distinctive form of influence derived from presence. Advisors connect strategic incentives to local behavior through monitoring and aid conditionality, while also exercising interpersonal influence over consequential decisions inside partner militaries. Drawing on original data on advisor deployments by the United States, Soviet Union/Russia, France, United Kingdom, and China from 1946 to 2021, I find that advisors are deployed more often to partners with significant, though not extreme, foreign policy misalignment, consistent with an influence logic of deployment. A case study of U.S. advising in El Salvador, based on original archival evidence and interviews with advisors, illustrates the influence logic at work in deployment decisions and advisors’ understandings of their responsibilities on the ground. These findings contribute to scholarship on intervention, security force assistance, and the interpersonal in international politics by showing why states choose more hands-on forms of intervention and how they use physical access, proximity, and interpersonal influence to manage wartime partnerships.
Tripwires for whom? Evaluating the Effects of Military Deaths on Elite and Public Support for Using Force, with Paul Poast and Dan Reiter (under review)
What conditions make societies and their governments more likely to support the use of military force? A central idea from international relations theory, Cold War history, and foreign policy is that “tripwire effects” after a nation’s troops have been killed in an international dispute can make actors more willing to use force. Despite the prominence of tripwire effects, very few published experimental studies explore for them. This paper argues that foreign policy elites are more likely to experience tripwire effects than the public, because they are more likely to believe in the importance of international reputation. Using two pairs of survey experiments based on a hypothetical US-China naval clash in the South China sea, we conduct one of the first experimental tests on the possibility of tripwire effects in general, and the first to examine possible elite-public gaps on tripwire effects. We find persistent tripwire effects for both elites and the public, though elites remain more supportive of escalation than the public even after accounting for presidential turnover, partisanship, and elite selection effects. Evidence further suggests that the elite-public gap is driven by different beliefs in the importance of reputation rather than a desire for punishment, revenge, or informational differences.