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.

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Recent Submissions

ItemOpen Access
On Target: Predicting Whether Defense-Related Legislation Will Follow its Intended Purpose
(West Point Press, 2025) Vrablic, Daniel
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.
ItemOpen Access
Horrors at Home: Assessing the Islamic State’s Strategy to Attack France and Belgium from Within
(West Point Press, 2025) Kokotakis, Giacoma
“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.
ItemOpen Access
The Incompatibility of the Triple-E Senate Reforms in Canada
(West Point Press, 2025) Hastick, Stephanie L.
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.
ItemOpen Access
In One Ear and Out the Other? Electoral Issue Salience and Elite Withdrawal from the Iraq War Coalition
(West Point Press, 2025) Fotiadis, Zach
Why do states withdraw from military coalitions? Such decisions often involve tension between distinct sources of pressure. Some member states must balance requests from coalition leaders to stay deployed with domestic political demands to pull out, particularly if the coalition in question is having difficulty achieving success. The author finds that in this context, domestic elections play a paramount role in influencing elite foreign policy choices when a country’s participation in a military coalition is a highly salient issue for its public. From constraining to empowering political leadership’s desired agenda, voters with foreign policy priorities are among the players with a seat at the decision-making table. This research thesis explores the conditions under which electorates prioritizing an international affairs issue will induce their respective leaders into adopting their position. The case study is the Iraq War Coalition, assessing whether the existence of anti-war electoral issue salience was a major factor compelling elites to withdraw. The research model ultimately produces the key finding that high relative anti-Iraq War electoral issue salience was a primary inducer of coalition exit among democratic states in the absence of elite consensus.
ItemOpen Access
Polarized Defense: the NDAA in an Era of Partisan Polarization
(West Point Press, 2025) Knights, Kijana E.
This study examines whether increased congressional polarization has diminished bipartisan support for the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), traditionally a bipartisan piece of legislation. Using DW-NOMINATE scores to measure polarization and analyzing House voting patterns from the 101st to 117th Congress (1989-2022), this research finds that more polarized members are significantly more likely to vote against the NDAA. The effect has intensified over time, with polarization having a stronger negative impact on NDAA support in the post-2002 period compared to earlier years. Linear regression analysis reveals that a one-unit increase in polarization score corresponds to a 0.749 decrease in likelihood of supporting the NDAA. These findings suggest that as the NDAA increasingly serves as a vehicle for non-defense policies, it becomes vulnerable to the same partisan dynamics affecting other legislation, potentially threatening its 60-year streak of passage and America’s defense policy stability.