June 23, 2020

An Affordable Defense of Asia

US military advantages over China are steadily eroding…For the last two decades, China has studied the US military, identified its key weaknesses, and developed the tactics and forces best suited to exploit those vulnerabilities. These challenges are compounded by significant deficiencies in today’s US joint force across all domains of

April 27, 2020

Beyond 1918: Bringing Pandemic Response into the Present, and Future

The current pandemic gives us an opportunity to envision new tools, methods, and response policies that leverage emerging technologies, which, if adopted and prudently employed, would enable capability to far better predict, prepare, if not prevent the “next” biosecurity war, and not merely repeat the errors of the “last”. 

April 20, 2020

An American Perspective on Post-Pandemic Geopolitics

Viewed from the other side of the Atlantic, the coronavirus crisis will have significant geopolitical implications in the near term, becoming possibly even more significant over the next few years.With this in mind, we should expect politics in Europe and the US to be more focused on the current health crisis and its follow-on implications.

April 15, 2020

Building a Marine Corps for Every Contingency, Clime, and Place

Marine Commandant Gen. David Berger’s recently published Force Design 2030 has riled up both the “old guard,” who fear for the service’s future, and industry lobbyists, who fear for the future of contracts for amphibious ships and F-35s. The document rationally outlines the changes necessary for the Marine Corps to play its role as the nation’s

April 10, 2020

The Melians’ Revenge

Russia’s military modernization and aggressive behavior continues to threaten the security of NATO’s frontline Allies, the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Russia’s proximity to these states and their distance from other NATO Allies presents the Alliance with a fundamental problem: if a crisis were to erupt with little warning

April 10, 2020

Ready or Not: Regaining Military Readiness during COVID19

The COVID19 pandemic has critically shaken the health, civil society, and economic security of the United States.  It also has tested the readiness management processes of the U.S. Defense Department. While we wait for treatments, the Department of Defense needs to maintain readiness of the force in the interim. Force readiness and management will be improved by rapidly deploying a point of care serological test to all in the U.S. military. 

Feb. 1, 2018

Low-Cost Access to Space: Military Opportunities and Challenges

Space activity is critical to the American way of war. The commercialization of space has potentially radical implications for U.S. national security through its impact on a range of military and intelligence functions and on the ability of the nation to effectively project power around the globe.

May 2, 2017

Tell-Tale MRAPS

A recent article in the Washington Free Beacon, “Biden Used False Data to Smear Marine Corps over Armored Vehicle Request from Iraq,” accomplishes the rare feat of politicizing a bipartisan issue; blackguarding both parties erroneously; and unnecessarily embarrassing Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. The April 24, 2017 article by Bill Gertz reports on a new unpublished study by retired Marine, Steve Chill. Chill participated in Marine Corps decision making on the Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicles used to protect servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan. Chill wrote his study to “correct the record” and prove the Marine Corps did not “drag its feet” in deploying MRAPs. Gertz and Chill get the story wrong, and thus obscure the lesson the Pentagon should have learned from the MRAP experience, which is that its decision making processes need reform.

July 12, 2016

Will Technological Convergence Reverse Globalization?

The Economist defines globalization as the “global integration of the movement of goods, capital and jobs,”1 and for decades, the process has been advancing. The combination of labor cost advantages, increasingly efficient freight systems, and trade agreements fueled globalization by providing regional cost advantages for manufacturing. Over the last six decades, it transformed agricultural societies into industrial powerhouses.