Kendrick Kuo
Biographic Data
| ID | 4793386 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kendrick Kuo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kendrick |
| FAMILY NAME | Kuo |
| SIGNATURE | KUO K |
| AFFILIATIONS | George Washington University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9053-0483 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 13 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 8 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
When tanks tank and bombs bomb
Military innovation is prized by political leaders and military officers alike, but the demand for it can mask significant pitfalls any innovation process must navigate. This article explores failure through three lenses. Conceptually, failure is difficult to define but we navigate these challenges by identifying three modes of failure. Methodologically, we explain why adjudicating failure and success is so difficult. Theoretically, the article e…
On military restoration
How to Think About Risks in US Military Innovation
Public discourse about military innovation in the United States tends to portray dramatic changes in technology, organisation and doctrine as desirable. Innovation is a gamble that new ways of war can supplant more traditional means and methods, but it is not always worth taking. Dynamics inherent to the innovation process make it challenging for militaries to properly manage risks. Military innovation is expensive in time and money, but is more …
Dangerous Changes
Prevailing wisdom suggests that innovation dramatically enhances the effectiveness of a state's armed forces. But self-defeating innovation is more likely to occur when a military service's growing security commitments outstrip shrinking resources. This wide commitment-resource gap pressures the service to make desperate gambles on new capabilities to meet overly ambitious goals while cannibalizing traditional capabilities before beliefs about th…
Military Innovation and Technological Determinism
Major theories of military innovation suggest that military organizations will converge on the proper employment of new weapons if they are responsive to strategic threats and overcome cultural, bureaucratic, and material constraints. Using a comparison of British and US interwar carrier programs, I show how these standard intuitions about military innovation wrongly assume that there is a predetermined performance trajectory embedded in new tech…
Nation-Building and the Role of Identity in Civil Wars
What is the relationship between politically relevant identities and violent dynamics within civil wars? Civil war scholars over the last decade have studied intra-war dynamics, such as the proliferation of rebel groups, alliances among belligerents, and cohesion within insurgent organisations. But a nation-building perspective has not been adequately integrated into this research program. We suggest that once we consider the socio-political orde…
Nationalism and Foreign Policy
Nationalism continues to be an important ideology that informs the way state elites formulate and implement foreign policy. The relationship between nationalism and foreign policy is complex: there are many relevant levels of analysis and multiple causal pathways linking nationalism and foreign policy. Scholars have identified national masses, elite policymakers, and the nation-state itself as units of analysis. The causal mechanisms that relate …
Revisiting the Salafi-jihadistThreat in Xinjiang
The fear of a burgeoning Salafi-jihadism in Xinjiang has been a public driving factor in Chinese policies in the region. This menace is exaggerated. Though there may be Salafi-jihadist elements among the larger, discontented Uyghur population, it is not a mass movement posing an existential threat to the Chinese political order in Xinjiang. Nationalism fuels this Sino-Uyghur conflict while Islam functions as a pragmatic weapon. Uyghur Islam, Uygh…
Dangerous Changes
Prevailing wisdom suggests that innovation dramatically enhances the effectiveness of a state's armed forces. But self-defeating innovation is more likely to occur when a military service's growing security commitments outstrip shrinking resources. This wide commitment-resource gap pressures the service to make desperate gambles on new capabilities to meet overly ambitious goals while cannibalizing traditional capabilities before beliefs about th…
Revisiting the Salafi-jihadistThreat in Xinjiang
The fear of a burgeoning Salafi-jihadism in Xinjiang has been a public driving factor in Chinese policies in the region. This menace is exaggerated. Though there may be Salafi-jihadist elements among the larger, discontented Uyghur population, it is not a mass movement posing an existential threat to the Chinese political order in Xinjiang. Nationalism fuels this Sino-Uyghur conflict while Islam functions as a pragmatic weapon. Uyghur Islam, Uygh…
Military Innovation and Technological Determinism
Major theories of military innovation suggest that military organizations will converge on the proper employment of new weapons if they are responsive to strategic threats and overcome cultural, bureaucratic, and material constraints. Using a comparison of British and US interwar carrier programs, I show how these standard intuitions about military innovation wrongly assume that there is a predetermined performance trajectory embedded in new tech…
Nation-Building and the Role of Identity in Civil Wars
What is the relationship between politically relevant identities and violent dynamics within civil wars? Civil war scholars over the last decade have studied intra-war dynamics, such as the proliferation of rebel groups, alliances among belligerents, and cohesion within insurgent organisations. But a nation-building perspective has not been adequately integrated into this research program. We suggest that once we consider the socio-political orde…
How to Think About Risks in US Military Innovation
Public discourse about military innovation in the United States tends to portray dramatic changes in technology, organisation and doctrine as desirable. Innovation is a gamble that new ways of war can supplant more traditional means and methods, but it is not always worth taking. Dynamics inherent to the innovation process make it challenging for militaries to properly manage risks. Military innovation is expensive in time and money, but is more …
Revisiting the Salafi-jihadistThreat in Xinjiang
The fear of a burgeoning Salafi-jihadism in Xinjiang has been a public driving factor in Chinese policies in the region. This menace is exaggerated. Though there may be Salafi-jihadist elements among the larger, discontented Uyghur population, it is not a mass movement posing an existential threat to the Chinese political order in Xinjiang. Nationalism fuels this Sino-Uyghur conflict while Islam functions as a pragmatic weapon. Uyghur Islam, Uygh…
Nationalism and Foreign Policy
Nationalism continues to be an important ideology that informs the way state elites formulate and implement foreign policy. The relationship between nationalism and foreign policy is complex: there are many relevant levels of analysis and multiple causal pathways linking nationalism and foreign policy. Scholars have identified national masses, elite policymakers, and the nation-state itself as units of analysis. The causal mechanisms that relate …
Nation-Building and the Role of Identity in Civil Wars
What is the relationship between politically relevant identities and violent dynamics within civil wars? Civil war scholars over the last decade have studied intra-war dynamics, such as the proliferation of rebel groups, alliances among belligerents, and cohesion within insurgent organisations. But a nation-building perspective has not been adequately integrated into this research program. We suggest that once we consider the socio-political orde…
Military Innovation and Technological Determinism
Major theories of military innovation suggest that military organizations will converge on the proper employment of new weapons if they are responsive to strategic threats and overcome cultural, bureaucratic, and material constraints. Using a comparison of British and US interwar carrier programs, I show how these standard intuitions about military innovation wrongly assume that there is a predetermined performance trajectory embedded in new tech…
Dangerous Changes
Prevailing wisdom suggests that innovation dramatically enhances the effectiveness of a state's armed forces. But self-defeating innovation is more likely to occur when a military service's growing security commitments outstrip shrinking resources. This wide commitment-resource gap pressures the service to make desperate gambles on new capabilities to meet overly ambitious goals while cannibalizing traditional capabilities before beliefs about th…
How to Think About Risks in US Military Innovation
Public discourse about military innovation in the United States tends to portray dramatic changes in technology, organisation and doctrine as desirable. Innovation is a gamble that new ways of war can supplant more traditional means and methods, but it is not always worth taking. Dynamics inherent to the innovation process make it challenging for militaries to properly manage risks. Military innovation is expensive in time and money, but is more …
On military restoration
When tanks tank and bombs bomb
Military innovation is prized by political leaders and military officers alike, but the demand for it can mask significant pitfalls any innovation process must navigate. This article explores failure through three lenses. Conceptually, failure is difficult to define but we navigate these challenges by identifying three modes of failure. Methodologically, we explain why adjudicating failure and success is so difficult. Theoretically, the article e…
Political science (7 works) · Defense, Military, and Policy Studies (5 works) · Political economy (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Politics (4 works) · Engineering (3 works) · Adversary (2 works) · Argument (complex analysis (2 works) · Business (2 works) · Computer security (2 works)