I recently had a piece published in Armed Forces Journal (A Security Strategy We Can Afford). The hook is:

There has not been a serious defense policy review since the Cold War. Our force structure is, as a result, increasingly incoherent given the arrays of challenges we face. The U.S. spends, by some measures, as much on the military as the rest of the world combined. And yet, fighting a low-intensity conflict in Iraq — a nation of only 23 million inhabitants — stressed the force to its limits. How is this possible? And how can we move out of this situation?

There are two fundamental problems with the way American defense policy is developed. The first is that we have not done a good job thinking through what we want the American military to be capable of. The second is that the process for developing strategy and then building supporting forces is broken.

I didn’t realize it had been published yet, and it has not picked up much coverage, though I did get a dismissive review from Tom Barnett (Selling ice boxes to eskimos).  Tom writes:

Interesting sales job: presents the usual across-the-board cuts bit up front, then three straw men to be dismissed, and then pleads for smarter use of allies (how about Japan, Taiwan, and Korea!) to do things like “projecting power in East Asia” (code for taking on China–there’s a new one!).

Tom misses the point of my piece, which is about having a serious debate about how to optimize the force rather than recommending any specific option.

The key from my perspective comes from my initial hook… we have not looked at these issues seriously since the 1980s.  We adopted a hedging strategy in 1991 and have since been locked into pure incrementalism.  Now, we seem to be drifting into a COIN-focused defense strategy, still without any serious, comprehensive debate.

The full set of papers from this project are available at: http://www.americansecurityproject.org/

UPDATE: Found another blog comment on this piece at Information Dissemination. With a more positive assessment:

Another take on acquisition reform, and as you might expect from a former NWC professor, he provides interesting choices regarding alternative futures.