At 32 years and now 119 issues, Joint Force Quarterly has had over 40 people involved in making the magic happen.

The United States and its allies and partners face a rapidly expanding array of biothreats, to include the potential employment of increasingly sophisticated and lethal biological weapons (BW).

This mid-decade review of contemporary Great Power competition is most welcome because it presents U.S. political leadership and the national security community with an opportunity to reflect on the inherent challenges in this latest round of geopolitical rivalry. Although the turn toward contestation among the United States, China, and Russia (as well as others) was formally acknowledged by Washington first in its 2017 National Security Strategy, Great Power competition had never disappeared from the international system even during the halcyon days after the Cold War’s ending.

Distant reaches of space loom as a strategic horizon. The vast majority of space operations have, so far, been limited to a few families of near-Earth orbits. However, space beyond geostationary Earth orbit, or xGEO, is likely to become important for strategic purposes in the near future. This is especially true of cislunar space, that region of space in which the gravity of Earth’s moon is significant. This paper refers to xGEO and cislunar space as Space Frontier Areas, since missions there have not yet reached sufficient scale to cluster into patterns of use.