by Melanie Marlowe, Bryan McGrath, Christopher Preble
(Defense News) Production of a component vital to protecting American troops from chemical attacks that can’t keep up with need. Key suppliers of aircraft parts that could go bankrupt at any time. A key producer of missile components that closed for two years before the Pentagon found out.
The Department of Defense can make smarter and faster acquisition decisions if it uses people more thoughtfully. Instead of involving top-level leaders at every decision point in the acquisition process, senior leaders should determine the organization’s enterprise-level goals, then communicate them to empowered and capable leaders who can decide how best to meet those goals.…
By Hal Brands, Bloomberg: "An American war against China or Russia would be truly awful. Even if the U.S. won — no sure thing — it could well suffer costs and casualties that would make the toll of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars seem minor by comparison. So is there a way the U.S. could stymie a Chinese attack in the Pacific, or a Russian land-grab in Eastern Europe, without having to defeat enemy forces head-on? This is the motivating question behind the idea of “horizontal escalation.”"
By Michael Barr, Strategy Bridge: "Seeing the variety of contexts and interactions changes the strategic perspective of the First World War, and challenges military professionals to consider preparations for great power struggles, gray zone wars, and asymmetric insurgencies not as an either/or proposition but as all the above."
There’s A Sequel for JEDI
By Kenneth Glueck, RealClearDefense: “Defense Secretary-nominee Esper will soon receive a brief on next-generation battlefield technology and the DoD move to the cloud. The question of which technology solution can best meet DoD’s cloud computing needs has been intensely debated for the past 18 months."