Karl P. Mueller

Karl P. Mueller is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. He specializes in research related to military and national security strategy, particularly coercion and deterrence.

Mueller has written and lectured on a wide variety of subjects, including airpower theory, grand strategy, economic sanctions, nuclear proliferation, counterterrorism policy, space weapons, and wargaming. Among his recent unclassified RAND publications are Innovation in the United States Air Force: Evidence from Six Cases (2016), Precision and Purpose: Airpower in the Libyan Civil War (2015), Denying Flight: Strategic Options for Employing No-Fly Zones (2013), Dangerous Thresholds: Managing Escalation in the 21st Century (Forrest E. Morgan et al., 2008), and Striking First: Preemptive and Preventive Attack in U.S. National Security Policy (2006).

His current projects focus on strategic competition with Russia and China, the use of airpower in the war against the Islamic State, military options for defending the Baltic States, and developing expert-adjudicated wargames for examining future conflict scenarios in Europe and Asia.

Before joining RAND in 2001, Mueller was a professor of comparative military studies at the U.S. Air Force’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies (SAASS). He is currently an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University and in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. He earned his Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University.