To begin 2022, we asked contributors what areas of strategic competition require increased attention and how to resource those areas. Further informing this focus on attention and resources is the observation from 1971 of two members of the Systems Analysis office under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara:

The notion, then, that in some meaningful sense the nation’s military requirements can be determined without considering costs is false. Military requirements, like all other requirements, have to be decided by judgments as to what resources will be devoted to what purposes and what sacrifices of other purposes will be made. [1]

Much ink has been spilled examining how the Marine Corps has wrestled with this problem, divesting some of its traditional capabilities for new technology. It seems fitting, therefore, that our series begin with a contribution from Mie Augier of the Naval Postgraduate School and U.S. Marine Corps officer Sean Barrett, who begin by stepping back, opening with the pointed words of retired General James Mattis: “No nation in history has maintained its military power if it failed to keep its fiscal house in order.” Maintenance of this military power requires a “holistic understanding” of strategic competition. Augier and Barrett illuminate how such an approach took hold in the Pentagon during the McNamara administration. But a post-industrial age calls for new solutions to create solid “interfaces between functions, offices, [and] organizations.” Our subsequent articles deal with this contemporary reality.

In the second article, Joshua Tallis encourages us to look beyond specific competitors. Arguing rather, that we prioritize the global commons “at sea, at the poles, and in space,” because these areas exist outside national sovereignty, thus opening significant zones of competition. This new conceptual filter enables tough choices about what to prioritize…and where to accept risk.

Stanley Lim then highlights one way in which the U.S. can make gains in one such commons: by joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. Participating in this partnership will not only enhance the kind of economic benefits Augier and Barrett called for in our first article, but would also pay other strategic dividends. 

The next two articles transition into reforms needed within the Department of Defense. With respect to risk, Neils J. Abderhalden argues strategic competition “presents two operational extremes” for military professionals. First, they must navigate the challenges of everyday competition, where an action may have outsized consequences. Second, they must face the possibility of war, where risk calculus is of a different character entirely. Abderhalden contends current risk management approaches in the Department of Defense are inadequate to manage these operational extremes and new theories and methods are needed. Next, Bob Bradford and Jeffrey E. Baker propose all the capabilities contributors might suggest for strategic competition have one common requirement right at the heart of this quarterly series: they need a better and more responsive Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) system.

Strategic competition requires difficult decisions that must be considered holistically.

Our next three articles make the kinds of specific recommendations these reforms seek to enable. H. Brandon Morgan calls for shifting resources from the Army to the Navy, from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific region, and from the realm of technology to the realm of cognition. These recommendations may be controversial in some circles, but Morgan argues this reprioritization will enable a more powerful and cohesive response to the challenges posed by China. Clyde J. Daines then takes a broader view, arguing for a highly-focused and cost-effective approach to promoting liberal democratic ideals in the face of authoritarianism. His approach requires that the U.S. both adopt an outward-looking focus and maintain civil-military norms domestically. Finally, Christine Krueger provides a pragmatic model to increase U.S. Army readiness that will be of interest to professionals in all services given the wide scale need to be prepared in the short term if strategic competition edges into something more like war.

Strategic competition requires difficult decisions that must be considered holistically. Our contributors to this series have provided a wide range of considerations for making tough choices about how to invest finite resources. We hope these articles contribute to and create a useful conversation. 

• Thinking Strategically: Economics, Resources, and Strategy, by Mie Augier and Sean F.X. Barret.

• Strategy of the Commons: Defending the International Order Where it is Most Vulnerable, by Joshua Tallis.

• Better Late than Never: The Cas for the United States to Join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, by Stanley Lim.

• Risk Hindered Decision Making: How the DoD’s Faulty Understanding of Risk Jeopardizes its Strategy, by Neils J. Abderhalden.

• Making and Implementing Strategic Choices is Hard, by Bob Bradford and Jeffrey E. Baker.

• Defense Reallocation for U.S. Strategic Competition with China, by H. Brandon Morgan.

• Competing Against Authoritarianism, by Clyde J. Daines.

• Paying for Tomorrow's Army Readiness Today, by Christine Krueger.

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Notes:

[1] Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith, How Much IS Enough? Shaping the Defense Program, 1961-1969 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2005), 37.