We are not going to “efficiency” our way out of the hard choices which the next administration will face fitting an already straining defense posture under a flatlined budget. In a commentary published in August, I expressed the hope that… Read more »
I am surprised by the vigorous hand-wringing this summer over the prospects for defense spending in a Democrat-dominated government beginning in January 2021. There’s every indication that the Democrats who may come to office next year with meaningful power over… Read more »
Next month at a small theatre in Los Angeles Westside, the Atlantic Council is presenting the workshop production of a new stage play it has been incubating, War Words, by the award-winning playwright Michelle Kholos Brooks. Based on Brooks’s interviews with those who… Read more »
How could we achieve a seamless integration of the industrial bases of the United States and its closest allies? That is the question addressed earlier this week in London at the Quadrilateral Conference of trade associations representing the national defense… Read more »
“I’d rather have decent answers to the right question than great answers to irrelevant questions.” This pithy precept appears at the top of page 1 of The Last Warrior, an intellectual history of Andrew Marshall, the furtive, 42-year director of… Read more »
What are operational concepts and is there a spin-on to the defense establishment from the commercial sphere that can infuse defense strategy with innovative answers to that question? Last November, I wrote about the report of the National Defense Strategy Commission…. Read more »
Writing in the Up Front column of Aviation Week & Space Technology, Steve Grundman renders a critical assessment of the report to Congress of the National Defense Strategy Commission, concluding that “if strategy is the stuff of making choices about… Read more »
Wedged into the week between the mid-term elections and Thanksgiving, publication on November 13th of “Providing for the Common Defense,” the report to Congress of the National Defense Strategy Commission, has drawn too little attention. In it, the dozen, sober-minded… Read more »
A convergence of indicators suggests the recently passed Defense Appropriations Act will mark a peak for US defense spending. Even the Administration’s own outyear defense-spending projections grow at an annual rate of only 2 percent, which is just enough to… Read more »
At the NATO summit four years ago, the heads of state and government gathered in Wales recommitted themselves to increasing defense spending in real terms and to achieving the NATO guideline to spend a minimum of 2 percent of their… Read more »