The new office will, director Dan Flynn told me, assess what other intelligence agencies around the world are doing and why, what the most effective technologies will be to cope with those changes, how the world is changing strategically and make recommendations to the Director of National Intelligence.

A new AFSPC study posits a possible future — named after ancient Chinese warlord Zhang He — where China dominates space even as human presence vastly expands to the Moon and beyond.

  Last year while in Japan for a meeting with senior defense and military leaders, the question most often posed to me was, “How is Yoda?” The questions were in reference to the nickname given to Andrew Marshall, arguably the foremost defense strategist of the past sixty years, who passed away this week at the… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: When the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee went to talk with the almost mystical Pentagon gang known as the Office of Net Assessment, they told him America can’t afford to execute the strategy we’re pursuing. “I asked them what they were lacking. They didn’t have an answer,” Rep. Adam Smith told… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace just released what a spokesman calls the “the first and only unclassified strategic net assessment of the future security dynamic between China, Japan, and the United States-including relative military capabilities and domestic and external variables.” For those who don’t wallow deeply in the Pentagon’s unique world, a net… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Transformation is back! Sort of. The pursuit of transformation, affiliated with the concept known as a Revolution in Military Affairs, became associated with the failed tenure of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and was publicly dropped as a central organizing concept of the military for that reason. The decade-long pursuit of counter-insurgency warfare didn’t… Keep reading →