Shawn Woodford

Shawn Woodford

Shawn Robert Woodford, Ph.D., is a military historian with nearly two decades of research, writing, and analytical experience on operations, strategy, and national security policy. His work has focused on special operations, unconventional and paramilitary warfare, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, naval history, quantitative historical analysis, nineteenth and twentieth century military history, and the history of nuclear weapon development. He has a strong research interest in the relationship between politics and strategy in warfare and the epistemology of wargaming and combat modeling. All views expressed here are his and do not reflect those of any other private or public organization or entity.
  • Joined: December 26, 2015
  • Articles: 302
  • Comments: 106

The U.S. Army’s Stryker Conundrum

As part of an initiative to modernize the U.S. Army in the late 1990s, then-Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki articulated a need for combat units that were more mobile and rapidly deployable than the existing heavy armor brigades. This…

Human Factors In Warfare: Dispersion

As I have written about before, the foundation of Trevor Dupuy’s theories on combat were based on an initial study in 1964 of the relationship between weapon lethality, casualty rates, and dispersion on the battlefield. The historical trend toward greater…

More On The U.S. Army’s ‘Identity Crisis’

The new edition of the U.S. Army War College’s quarterly journal Parameters contains additional commentary on the question of whether the Army should be optimizing to wage combined arms maneuver warfare or wide-area security/Security Force Assistance. Conrad Crane, the chief…