II. Recommendations for Scholars and Think Tanks

II. Recommendations for Scholars and Think Tanks

The lack of funding for security studies imperils both the development of critical national security talent and the production of directly policy-relevant research. This section outlines focus areas for research, identifies three resource requirements, suggests four practical steps the field can take, and then outlines how those translate into specific funding priorities for foundations.
 

A. Priorities for Scholarship
 

There are many other important ways besides next-generation training programs that increased funding in the field can improve global security in the coming years. The ongoing upending of international relations and rapid technological change call for renewed attention to broader issues and to pedagogical goals suited to the current unsettled moment. Rather than focus only on the current “hot topics” such as AI, climate change, quantum, and biosecurity (all of which are important), we believe that maintaining a diverse portfolio of research topics is appropriate in a time of rapid change, precisely because of how much uncertainty this rapid change produces. Areas of particular value include: 

• Historically oriented work that puts present security problems into context. Recent analytical work on past leadership transitions in the Soviet Union and China, for example, highlights why the outcome of a transition from Putin in Russia is very hard to predict. Research on the effects of crises on future cooperation between adversaries, to give another example, shows how leaders’ preexisting beliefs can matter more than the risk posed by the crisis interactions. Finally, the experience of Germany between the World Wars is a powerful example of the relationship between democratic backsliding and violent conflict.
• Paradigms and tools that policymakers can apply to make sense of both the broader emerging context and specific policy challenges. Workshop participants discussed at length how powerful Thomas Schelling’s work was in helping government officials think through Cold War–era nuclear doctrine. The same may well be true today in an age of increasingly precise weaponry as the proliferation of one-way attack weapons, unmanned sensors, next generation robotic aircraft and ships, and AI-enabled precision targeting capabilities create new deterrence challenges, as the Ukraine war and the U.S.-Israel-Iran war highlight. These conflicts also illustrate the need for more interdisciplinary research on the interactions between missile, drone, and air defense technologies and the future of strategic stability.
• Research that poses and answers the type of big-picture interdisciplinary questions that government experts and policymakers do not have time to address and often have not looked around the corner to see. For example, planning for a potential conflict in the Gulf would have benefited from work highlighting how insurance markets shape global trade. In recent conflicts, a small number of successful attacks on shipping dramatically reduced insurance availability, functionally closing the Red Sea in late 2023 and the Strait of Hormuz in early 2026, without requiring Houthi forces or Iran to exert uncontested physical control of maritime choke points.
• Research on decision-making in national and international security organizations. A great deal of work has been done on the psychology of judgment and decision-making that is relevant to understanding the choices that leaders make in national security. Applying lessons from historical successes and failures can help formulate better decision-making procedures and protocols going forward. Such work can also provide insight into how choices are framed, how advisors and others might manipulate the options available to decision-makers, and how legal and ethical considerations can best be incorporated into decisions about war and peace. 
   

B. What the Security Studies Field Needs 
 

Addressing these priorities requires three key resources. 

First, because today’s challenges span existing disciplinary boundaries, researchers will need supportive environments for developing and incubating new or heterodox ideas. As the storied histories of institutions such as the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (where Kahneman, Thaler, and Tversky developed core concepts of behavioral economics), the Institute for Advanced Study (where von Neumann conceptualized the stored-program computer), and the Santa Fe Institute (which developed the field of complex systems science) clearly demonstrate, institutions that bring intellectually diverse groups together to pursue unconventional topics outside of normal publication pressures can allow novel concepts to flourish. 

Second, scholars need opportunities for networking, synthesis, and developing interdisciplinary and international connections. Many of the issues discussed above involve topics outside the expertise of most scholars working on national security issues alone. Just as the Cold War security studies community benefited greatly by having physicists and computer scientists work with political scientists and strategic nuclear deterrence theorists on the technical limitations of missile defense, we will need research collaboration and dual-competency training in new disciplines, including AI, bioengineering, environmental science, quantum physics, and aerospace engineering. And working consistently with global scholars will bring greater insight and intuition into how their nations will respond to shifting U.S. priorities and shifting understandings of U.S. policy processes. While often opaque to U.S. scholars, views of and trust in the U.S. government ebbed and flowed substantially over time in many countries. Building broader research communities will thus support more accurate and effective analysis. 

Third, and related to the two requirements above, the security studies field needs both to meet the moment and to have the ability to build for the long term. Developing enduring research and curriculum on the topics and priorities discussed above will require making sense of a fundamentally different international environment than that in any living scholar or policymaker’s professional memory. The decades-long understanding that underpinned the post–Cold War order, that the United States would invest consistently in forms of international cooperation thought to deliver shared goods and benefits (e.g., the UN, WTO, IAEA, WHO), is changing as U.S. policy reorients on multiple dimensions. Policymakers in many countries now see the United States as a disruptor, rather than an order-builder. The complex task of creating a more secure new world order out of today’s widespread chaos and conflict will require years of sustained effort within the United States and with international partners. 
 

C. How to Get There
 

From a practical perspective, there are several important steps the field can take if it is to “flood the zone with new scholarship,” as one workshop participant advocated. 

First, devote resources to improving the quality of undergraduate training on security challenges. Most people making national security policy come from military and legal backgrounds. The last chance they get to think conceptually on international security challenges is often as advanced undergraduates. After that, the majority serve in operational roles until they return to policymaking at the mid-career stage. These career trajectories create risk because most undergraduate training on international security topics is two or three generations behind the knowledge frontier. And diplomatic/military history is rarely taught, meaning that today’s students have fewer chances to build intuition or to learn from important past cases than previous generations.

Focused effort to improve security-related education should thus be a major priority. This should include:

• Creating customizable teaching materials that draw on the most recent scholarship and include sufficient instructional guidance so that widespread adoption is low-cost for faculty already overloaded with other responsibilities.
• Incentivizing courses on the threats of the moment, as was done so effectively with nuclear security issues during the Cold War, civil wars in the 1990s, and terrorism in the post-9/11 period.
• Developing innovative teaching approaches in security studies, including experiential learning that draws on capabilities of generative AI tools. The long-standing military traditions of staff rides and war gaming provide rich materials to draw on for such efforts.11 
• Develop new ways to bring military officers with their operational focus into training programs in major universities. Their presence supports undergraduate and graduate education by providing practical and operational insights into studying defense procurement, crises and escalation dynamics, environmental causes and consequences of conflict, and security decision-making. 

Second, support both national and international study groups on particularly salient topics. These facilitate innovation through extended focus on specific issues and foster productive exchange between centers of excellence domestically and internationally. While the exact topics chosen should be responsive to scholarly and policy demand, effective study groups need to be: independent of government, so they can challenge existing policies when needed; interdisciplinary, because discipline-specific topics are well-covered by current academic structures; and staffed with editorial, organizational, and research support, because in the current funding environment faculty time is at even more of a premium than it has been in past eras. 

Third, make sure that key centers of excellence can sustain the human capital development pipeline of Ph.D. students by providing them with opportunities to build policy connections and with the bandwidth to address emerging topics as technology and international alliances shift. These institutions have historically played a vital role in mentoring early-career professionals in policy-relevant work and in providing network opportunities and exposure to policy professionals who can help them build the skills to design projects with and for the policymaking community. Critically, these institutions must be able to operate at a scale that generates robust intellectual community and draws engagement from scholars in multiple disciplines.

Fourth, invest in interdisciplinary pre- and postdoctoral fellowships. These fellows are often the “glue” that holds training, study groups, and centers of excellence together as a system because their movement between institutions builds networks and enables interdisciplinary projects and feedback loops. From a human capital perspective, time spent at new institutions is often critical for scholars working on complex topics. It provides time to develop heterodox ideas that benefit from diverse feedback and expanded networks. Hundreds of alumni of pre- and postdoctoral fellowships at leading security studies centers have gone on to senior government, think tank, and academic roles. Despite many challenges to the field, these fellowships remain in high demand, and the current supply of positions is inadequate.
 

D. Recommendations for Foundations and Individual Philanthropists
 

Philanthropy will have a critical role to play in meeting this moment. The above analysis, insights from the meeting, and additional conversations raise six focus areas for investment. Addressing these would implicitly meet the three broad community needs identified above:

1. Curriculum and teaching innovation support so that faculty can generate the kinds of educational opportunities that would address the long-standing deficiencies in undergraduate security education. 
2. Study groups that cross geographic, disciplinary, and political boundaries. In an environment of novel transnational risks, bringing researchers together to work on focused topics with modest staff support has the potential to create the kinds of analytical communities needed for the next 20 years.
3. Long-term support for core staff and programmatic activities at existing centers of excellence to ensure they can continue playing a catalytic role and operate at a scale that supports the human capital development pipeline. 
4. Pre- and postdoctoral fellowships at established centers that can readily accommodate additional scholars and provide immediate access to well-developed professional networks.
5. Support to international centers that are smaller in scope and lack flexible funds to facilitate the international collaborations that are so critical to understanding future challenges. EU funding mechanisms, for example, are long-term and inflexible, making it challenging for European institutions to use them to respond to the current dynamic moment.
6. Pilot grants to creative individual scholars that temporarily free them from teaching and enable them to develop innovative projects to the point that they can win more structured funding opportunities from national science bureaucracies. While such funding remains available, its selection criteria prioritize established topics, meaning that novel work often must demonstrate proof-of-viability to be funded.