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The New Power Politics offers a fresh view of power and how it works in global politics among important contemporary security issues. Power is dynamic; it is something governors must continually cultivate, and its use in one situation has consequences for future relationships, and thus, future power.

In this article, we seek to determine whether officers support the post-Cold War's range of new missions and why. To this end, we examine the attitudes of U.S. officers at the command and staff colleges for each service branch. On average, we find that while officers support traditional missions more than new missions, they do support these new missions and believe they address the greatest dangers facing the U.S. We also find that officers are more likely to appreciate the importance of military participation in humanitarian assistance, antiterrorism, and drug interdiction when they serve in a noncombat role, and those who believe that their MOS leads to future career success are more likely to support peace enforcement and peacekeeping. Most significantly, officers' enthusiasm about new missions is linked to their beliefs about civilian attitudes. On average, officers believe that the president supports the entire range of missions. They see Congress and (especially) the public as more suspicious of new missions. Officers are most likely to support new post-Cold War missions when they also believe there is both congressional and public support for them.

Since the 1990s, the private provision of military and security services has become a common feature of local, national, and transnational politics. The prevalence of private security has generated important questions about its consequences, but data to answer these questions are sparse. In this article, we introduce the Private Security Events Database (PSED) that traces the involvement of private military and security companies (PMSCs) in events in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia from 1990 to 2012. We describe the PSED project, highlight its descriptive findings, conduct a replication and reanalysis of Akcinaroglu and Radziszewski's contract data in Africa, and compare the two databases' coverage of Sierra Leone from 1991 to 1997. Our analysis demonstrates new insights into the relationship between PMSCs and civil war duration, confirming a correlation between PMSC presence and shorter conflicts, but questioning the logic Akcinaroglu and Radziszewski propose. It also points to a number of productive paths for future research.