by Michael McNair at Medium
The Architect of U.S. Defense Strategy
The man setting U.S. defense strategy has already told you exactly how he thinks. He published the playbook years before taking office. And surprisingly few analysts have actually read it.
Elbridge Colby, or “Bridge” to those who know him, now serves as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, the senior official responsible for running U.S. defense strategy.
Captain John Konrad, after spending a week inside the Pentagon, put it bluntly in his 13,000-word field report for gCaptain: “aside from Hegseth, the most powerful gravitational body in the building is Elbridge Colby.” He added that Colby’s “grand strategy remains exactly what he published in his books and interviews long before taking office. He is executing it now.”
Most officials don’t tell you how they think until they’re already in office, if ever. Colby did the opposite. He spent years laying out his framework in public. His 2021 book The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict reads less like an academic exercise and more like the playbook for how the United States is now approaching defense strategy.
For anyone doing serious macro or geopolitical analysis, this creates an unusual opportunity. The assumptions are visible. The logic is traceable. The framework is on the page. And yet most analysts I encounter haven’t read him and are consequently misreading American strategic moves in ways that lead to fundamentally flawed conclusions.
The Systems Thinker…
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