Ideas

Great Power Competition Comes Home to America

Our leaders’ efforts to heal divisions among our fellow citizens are key to national defense.

Ideas

We Are Our Own Worst Enemy

America’s national security depends on our ability to turn today’s hyperpartisan division into tomorrow’s cooperation.

Ideas

Time to Rethink Arms Sales to Taiwan

Once, they might have tilted the military balance. Now they just destabilize the region.

Ideas

The Election Without a Debate over War

We go to the polls without the candidates having exchanged meaningful thoughts about the American way of war — and what we might do differently.

Ideas

Donald Trump is No Jack Kennedy. Or Khrushchev.

The president lacks the experience, character, credibility, and confidence to navigate our country through a Cuban Missile Crisis. We need Joe Biden.

Ideas

The Best Tech for Troops (Needs an Easier Path to Reach Them)

The Pentagon must keep lowering barriers for startup companies, especially in artificial intelligence and machine learning — and help them stay in the game.

Ideas

The West Is Surprisingly Well-Equipped for Gray-Zone Deterrence

Authoritarian officials and oligarchs interact with Western nations in ways that give democratic governments leverage.

Ideas

The October (or November) Surprise Neither Trump Nor Biden Wants

We need independent, scrupulously apolitical intelligence analysis in the White House that can compete with our worst instincts.

Ideas

What Clinton’s Foreign Affairs Article May Mean for the Defense Budget

Her approach, more rebalancing rather than modernizing, avoids a simple zero-sum frame of defense vs. non-defense spending.

Ideas

How to Avoid a Violent Election Season

Beware the 'security dilemma.' Tell Americans that arming up, or posturing to do so against each other, could only make things worse.

Ideas

In A Post-COVID World, We Need AI More Than Ever

Artificial intelligence tools promise, among other things, to make the Pentagon more efficient.

Ideas

Want Real Security? Create Better Global Digital Rules and Norms

The longer the U.S. waits to throw its weight behind efforts to create rules for today’s digital competition, the less hope it has of retaining advantage.

Ideas

The Head of US Intelligence Has Ceased to Be an Honest Broker

The result has been grave damage to U.S. counterintelligence and electoral security efforts.

Ideas

Preserve the Jones Act

China’s burgeoning fleets underscore the importance of legislation that bolsters our own.

Ideas

As the US Slumps Away, China Subsumes African Security Arrangements

Organizations created to fight terror groups after 9/11 are becoming conduits for Beijing’s surveillance and influence.

Ideas

The Right’s Disinformation Machine Is Getting Ready for Trump to Lose

QAnon has become a linchpin of far-right media—and the effort to preemptively delegitimize the election.

Ideas

Ep. 75: Army Chief Gen. McConville

How is the U.S. Army dealing with COVID? And what about that new joint project with the Air Force, CJADC2?

Ideas

What We Don’t Know About Military Innovation

It’s time to take stock of the Pentagon’s various rapid-acquisition efforts.

Ideas

To Reboot Arms Control, Start with Small Steps

Stop accusing. Set aside questions of structure. Start talking.