USAWC Crest

Decisive Point Podcast

Season 7
2026
Season 6
2026
Season 5
2024
Season 4
2023
Season 3
2022
Season 2
2021
Season 1
2020

Recent Episodes

  • Decisive Point Podcast

    By Dr. Thomas Bruscino, Louis G. Yuengert

    The US military must create standing, numbered, and regionally aligned Joint warfighting headquarters— American Expeditionary Forces (AEFs)—around a command council and a staff organized into Joint centers and cells. Calls for standing Joint force headquarters are not new, but the demonstrated military effectiveness of the Joint Task Force (JTF) model coupled with increasing service-specific resource requirements and tightening fiscal constraints have resulted in little evolution in joint force headquarters construction since the end of World War II.

  • Decisive Point Podcast

    By Dr. Erik W. Goepner

    This podcast argues the more trauma endured by a population, the more civil war the country will experience in the future. Drawing on mental health, trauma, and neurobiological research, it builds a new theory of civil war that fills existing gaps in current civil-war literature, and then tests the theory via statistical analysis of a large sample size (large-n statistical analysis). The conclusions will help policymakers and US military leadership better understand civil wars and the limits of American power to end them.

  • Decisive Point Podcast

    By MAJ John Fernandes, MAJ Nicolas Starck, CPT Richard Shmel, MAJ Charles Suslowicz, Dr. Jan Kallberg, LTC Todd Arnold

    The skill and capacity of Army cyber forces have grown in the decade since their creation. This podcast focuses on needed structural changes to the Army’s portion of the Cyber Mission Forces that will enable their continued growth and maturity since the Army’s past organizational and structural decisions impose challenges impacting current and future efficiency and effectiveness. This assessment of the current situation highlights the areas military leadership must address to allow the Army’s cyber forces to continue evolving to meet the needs of multi-domain operations.

  • Decisive Point Podcast

    By Dr. C. Anthony Pfaff

    The special operations community could best address the perceived ethical crisis it faces by professionalizing as an institution. While earlier assessments have attributed special operations forces’ ethical issues to a focus on mission accomplishment that led to a broken force generation process and a high operations tempo, such diagnoses obscure a more comprehensive solution. Using sociologist Andrew Abbott’s work on professions as a framework, this article explores the benefits of building the kinds of institutions that can claim a jurisdiction, develop and certify expert knowledge, and establish and apply a code of ethics that addresses special operations unique concerns so that it builds trust and better serves the American people.