Barry R. Posen

Director, MIT Security Studies Program; Ford International Professor of Political Science. Scholar in the field of political science and international relations, and Director of MIT's Security Studies Program. Used balance-of-power and organization theory to explain how militaries innovate. Developed new measures of conventional military power and showed how conventional military operations could trigger unintended escalation to nuclear war. Developed a novel explanation for contemporary ethnic conflicts and a new conceptual framework for understanding the military foundations of U.S. hegemony. Authored in 2014 Restraint: A New Foundation for US Grand Strategy, a fundamental critique of post- Cold War US national security policy.  Received APSA Woodrow Wilson Award for The Sources of Military Doctrine (1986).