Welcome to USMA Athena
USMA Athena is a secure digital service managed by the United States Military Academy Library to make the work of USMA scholars freely available, while also ensuring these resources are organized to preserve the legacy of USMA scholarship. The mission of USMA Athena is to showcase the academic impact and intellectual capital that has become synonymous with the celebrated heritage of educational prowess attributed to the Long Gray Line. Scholarship submitted to USMA Athena benefits from added visibility and discoverability via Google Scholar in addition to the use of persistent URLs that will provide enduring access to the work over time.
Recent Submissions
Item Death by a Thousand Cuts: Commercial Data Risks to the Army(Army Cyber Institute, 2023-12)This report outlines the force protection challenges related to publicly available information (PAI), and specifically highlights commercial data exposed through data brokers. The rapid, widespread, and low-cost availability of data about personnel poses significant operations security (OPSEC) and force protection vulnerabilities for the Army. The recommendations for action included in this report emphasize organizational mitigation actions, as opposed to individual training or national-level policy changes. These are actions that the Army can implement with existing authorities – in absence of federal data privacy legislation or DoD directive – to protect the force while preserving the civil liberties and privacy of its members. While many of the analytic technologies outlined in this report are touted as the Industry standard for marketing, they are widely viewed as invasive by privacy and civil liberties experts – while granting users little transparency or control over what data is collected about them.Item Playing Out of Your Mind: Be All You Can Be as a Military Musician(2025-08-13)This manual is a transformative guide for military musicians striving to excel in high-pressure, unpredictable environments. Combining insights from performance psychology and military expertise, it equips musicians with tools to enhance focus, manage stress, and overcome performance anxiety. Learn to harness mental skills like goal setting, arousal regulation, and concentration to thrive in austere conditions. Whether navigating ceremonial duties or balancing extra responsibilities, this resource empowers you to perform at your peak, adapt to challenges, and maintain resilience. Unlock your full potential, master the art of playing out of your mind, and be all you can be as a military musician.Item On Target: Predicting Whether Defense-Related Legislation Will Follow its Intended Purpose(West Point Press, 2025)Using the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, I create a predictive theoretical framework to determine whether or not defense-related legislation will follow its intended purpose. I articulate the factors of the framework through an organizational approach and test and compare my findings with two other notable pieces of defense legislation: the National Security Act of 1947 and the War Powers Act of 1973. In doing so, I hypothesize triggering events to which new legislation responds, internal actors in the policy stream, and external pressures outside the policy stream are the strongest factors that affect whether or not defense-related legislation will follow its intended purpose when enacted into law. In applying this framework, I find these factors to hold some predictive value, but that internal agents in the policy stream to be the most salient in determining if a piece of defense legislation will detract from its purpose; I find external pressures outside the policy stream hold the least predictive value.Item Horrors at Home: Assessing the Islamic State’s Strategy to Attack France and Belgium from Within(West Point Press, 2025)“There is no excuse for any Muslim not to migrate to the Islamic State ... joining [its fight] is a duty on every Muslim. We are calling on you either to join or carry weapons [to fight] wherever you are,” said a spokesperson for the Islamic State in a May 2015 audio message (Gardner 2015). It served as perhaps the clearest indication of the Islamic State’s external strategy: conducting attacks against the West from within. From a perspective of lethality, the Islamic State successfully employed this strategy. Between 2014 and 2019, five Islamic State-directed attacks in Europe have killed 188 people (Bergen, Sterman, and Salyk-Virk 2019), and including other attacks that have been conducted by individuals inspired by Islamic State ideology, this figure has increased considerably. Even though it lacked the military power to face the West head-on, the Islamic State’s actions caused tragic losses that shook European communities and worsened social tensions arising from the refugee crisis. This paper examines past Islamic State attacks using foreign fighters and homegrown terrorists in France and Belgium, its networks in those countries, and its Western-targeted recruitment strategies. It concludes that the Islamic State’s strategy to direct attacks against theWest from within succeeded because of its French and Belgian networks and the Al-Hayat media branch’s effective Western-targeted propaganda, although the strategy proved unsustainable due to territorial loss and social media content moderation. Currently, the group’s increased activity, ‘digital caliphate,’ and returning foreign fighters require the Islamic State to be viewed as an enduring, significant threat to the West.Item The Incompatibility of the Triple-E Senate Reforms in Canada(West Point Press, 2025)As Canadian institutions have been shaped and informed by many influences out-side of Canada’s borders, one must ask: Can imported ideas of reform to Canada’s Senate, such as the Triple E Senate reform representing having an equal, elected, and effective Senate, be compatible within a Canadian setting? One will find that the ideas of reform in the Triple-E Senate are American imports that cannot be applied to Canada’s ideological landscape of political culture and systems. With an equal Senate, it does not consider that certain provinces within Canada are treated differently due to French representation being integral to Canada and its institutions. Furthermore, the elected Senate impedes Canada’s cultural and political understanding of the Senate as an institution recognized for its independence and providing sober second thought. Lastly, an effective Senate fails to recognize that Canada’s institutional system already gives the Senate powers equivalent to the House of Commons. When examining the arguments for having a Triple-E Senate, it becomes apparent that Triple-E Senate reforms are the embodiment of American political culture and systems that happen to be incompatible with Canada’s political cultures and systems. It discounts the reality of the issues that will arise from the expectation that such reforms will seamlessly fit in Canada, and thus, one must respond accordingly and reject Triple-E Senate reforms.
Communities in USMA Athena
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