Laura M. Thurston Goodroe & Adam Lowther
It is time the services stop cutting the budgets and staff of the professional journals and military presses that allow Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, Guardians, and civilian contributors to discuss and the debate the future of the services, the profession of arms, and how the American military can remain the best in the world. Such cuts are short-sighted and do far more harm than good. Let us explain.
I, (Adam) was once at an international meeting in Changsha, China, representing the US Air Force, when a colonel from the People’s Liberation Army approached me and said, “I read your journal. We can match your technology, but we cannot match the quality of your officers. They are much better thinkers than our own.” I knew at that moment that our professional journals Strategic Studies Quarterly and Air & Space Power Journal (ASPJ) mattered and influenced how the Chinese thought about us and themselves. In the decade since that day, ASPJ—Mandarin ceased publication along with Arabic and French editions. With those cuts went significant influence in China, the Arab world, and Francophone countries around the world.
If current 2025 budget proposals for Air University Press (AUP), the publisher of the above-mentioned journals, and National Defense University (NDU) Press, which publishes Joint Force Quarterly (JFQ) and Prism remain unchanged, operations will become virtually untenable. The circumstances are similar for Naval War College Press, Army War College Press, Marine Corps University Press, and Joint Special Operations University Press.
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