Dr Kerry Chavez

Co-Director for Air Power

Kerry Chávez is an assistant professor in the Military and Strategic Studies Department at the U.S. Air Force Academy. She is also a two-time nonresident research fellow with the Modern War Institute at West Point and a nonresident research fellow with the Institute for Global Affairs. Her research focuses on the politics, strategies, and emerging technologies of modern warfare and international security. She has two novel datasets—Military Operations with Novel Strategic Technologies in r (MONSTr) offers a comprehensive list of U.S. military operations from 1989 to 2021 featuring the means of force used, geocoded locations, combatant rosters, and information on structural dependencies between events within campaigns and wars. Her dataset on violent nonstate actor drone adoption has received international attention and is considered a cornerstone in understanding quantitative trends on this phenomenon. She partners with several policy-making and private industry groups to socially contextualize, empirically ground, and generate synthetic data for efforts to stay on the leading edge of emerging threats.