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Military strategists Dr. Frank G. Hoffman (retired) and Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria II analyze the 2026 National Defense Strategy.
Host (Stephanie Crider)
You are listening to Decisive Point. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.
I’m talking with Dr. Frank G. Hoffman and Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria II today.
Hoffman is the author of “The Next National Defense Strategy: Mission-Based Force Planning,” which was published in the Summer 2025 issue of Parameters. He recently retired from the federal government after more than 46 years of service as a Marine, civil servant, and senior Pentagon official. His last post was at the Institute for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University.
Echevarria is currently a professor of strategy at the US Army War College. He’s held the General Douglas MacArthur Chair of Research and the Elihu Root Chair of Military Studies and is the author of six books on military strategy.
So, Dr. Hoffman, a lot has happened since we published your article. I’m really looking forward to this conversation today. My first question, in fact, did you get what you were hoping for from the new National Defense Strategy [NDS]?
Dr. Frank G. Hoffman
Yes, [I am] satisfied. I have a certain sympathy for folks who write strategy documents, and so, I know how difficult it is, and I know that these documents have to talk to many audiences. And, you know, you could chop up the 10, 12 pages of actual texts of the summary that’s out there and see that it’s talking to the White House, that it’s talking to allies, it’s talking to adversaries, it’s talking to commercial vendors. I mean, it has a lot of audiences, and I’ve seen a lot of criticisms, and I’m sympathetic because I’ve been in the shoes of [those] trying to edit or craft a couple of these in my prior life.
But, I was pleased with the framework. It has some clarity to it. I think like Dr. E. [Echevarria], I took out all the op [operations] art terminology from the 2018 Strategy, things like lines of effort and things that aren’t as strategic, and I tried to, you know, visualize a theory of success for our strategy. And, I don’t get that necessarily out of these four elements, but the way they are clearly stated and prioritized, I agree with that, and it’s largely in sync with my article—with some improvements.
Host
I feel very fortunate to have two such esteemed strategists in the studio with me today, and I'm curious how each of you see theory informing the recently published NDS.
And also, where do theory and force planning realities collide most sharply?
Hoffman
On the theoretical part, dealing with strategy per se, you know, one of the things I’ve written about, I think Dr. E’s written about [it], too, is the importance of a theory of success, which I think deals with the ways of a strategy.
Of course, it’s also important to have coherence between the ends, ways, and the means. One of the reasons I was writing my article over a year ago was the insolvency problem, which really deals with the means gap.
So, I don’t see an overarching integrated theory of success for the four elements, but I do see—particularly for the China component of the strategy—a clear theory of success expressed. The foundation for that was in the 2018 Strategy. It’s [from] some of Mr. [Elbridge A.] Colby’s writings in his book in the past. So, I see that imprinted in there, and that’s the part of theory that I see practically employed in the Strategy.
But I do think that the NDS Summary, as I understand it—I understand it’s just a shell and the budget hasn’t been submitted, but I don’t see the Strategy as written for closing the insolvency gap very much. It’s not a compelling or persuasive story for Congress to fund the gaps that I’ve seen in the past, which are mentioned in the Strategy. The president has talked about a very large increase in the means, but I haven’t seen that submitted to the Hill. And this Strategy won’t lift up the attention of Congress on what to do with that money. It’s sort of written as a strategy that makes trade-offs that are pretty clear about Europe for Asia and the Middle East and things. It’s a strategy that’s largely trying to make [the most of] the harsh, constrained resources, which is applaudable, but it’s not a compelling story for a change if that’s what the president really wants.
Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria II
From my standpoint, the theory and strategy mix has to do with our basic assumptions and how those are informed by a theory as a foundation. Even if we aren’t consciously thinking about a particular kind of theory as we’re trying to write a strategy, I think we are informed by the assumptions that are built into a theoretical approach and so on.
But I think Frank is right that one of the things that I did not see in this NDS was closing the gap. The $36 trillion, I think, is what you cited in your article last year, and the last number I saw was $38 trillion in debt.
Hoffman
It goes up $7 million an hour.
Echevarria
Yeah, so some serious effort is needed there, but maybe that will be forthcoming, and a plan to get there will be forthcoming in the upcoming months or something. I don’t know. We’ll see, I suppose.
Host
I’d love to hear about your thoughts on the two-war framework. Is it obsolete? Is it misapplied? And if it is, what should replace it?
Hoffman
I spent a lot of time [on this topic]. In fact, that was largely the motivation for writing that particular article. I’d have to go back to an article that Dr. Echevarria edited, I think in the 2016 time period, where I wrote my first two MTW [two major theater wars] article, and I’m in favor of giving a president options.
Presidents don’t want to be constrained if they can afford it. And so, you know, most of my time in the Pentagon, we’ve dealt with a two MRC [major regional conflict] or some version where we’re trying to give the presidents, you know, optionality. And so, my offer, because I was trying to close the gap in defense spending, was to say we’re gonna do one MRC, or war, unilaterally, and we’re going to do one with allies.
And [I] published that article and actually got called to see the Secretary of Defense to talk about that article in 2017, and he totally disagreed with me because, historically, we’ve always gone to war with allies. So, saying we’re going to do something unilaterally doesn’t do much strategically or historically. And in fact, it lets allies off, which for the last 10 years we’ve been trying to get allies to do more for themselves—and ourselves—for our collective aim. So, that was my motivation for writing that. I’ve dealt with the debate inside the Pentagon about all the things we’re trying to pay for and trying to prioritize. And so, I was trying to come up with constructs. I’m very conscious, as Yogi Berra said, you know, “In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.” And, the same thing is [true] with the two-war theory.
Strategically, it makes sense. I have very, very great friends who have written on behalf of this in various think tanks and people with great government experience. They’re very smart. They’re for that, but they’re also for a grand strategy that is different than what this administration is pursuing. We’re not pursuing global dominance, hegemony. We’re not underwriting an international rule-based order anymore. So, that’s where I [sense] that it’s obsolete. But in theory, it’s useful.
But what I was worried about was the advocacy of this particular construct, externally with Congress, is about trying to get a military that’s the military we want to have—large, robust, forward-deployed, deterring. It’s about the bureaucratic interest of the machine to want to have this robustness and risk reduction. But in the practice of it, what I find is we end up with a very conventional legacy-focused capability, and we buy what we have today, and the production lines are open on the Hill that the Congress wants to keep producing. And so, we’ll end up with tanks and rifles and airplanes and helicopters. We don’t invest in some of the things that either represent broader threats, new threats, [or] new domains that we need to be investing in.
And so, I think it expands the gap and increases the risk involved in both the first and the second conflict. I’ve called this the lose-lose strategy because I don’t think that Congress is going to give us 100 percent of the force structure for two wars, 100 percent of the recruiting money, the readiness money, and the equipment modernization money that you need. So, you end up with something like 80 percent of what you need for either of the two wars and, if you go to war, you could end up losing both of them.
And so, you know, that’s the difference between the theory and the practice. You know, we don’t get that kind of money, and we end up accepting readiness shortfalls. We ended up not investing in our people and MILCON [military construction]. We end up not investing in munitions inventories [and] all the things that are the places the service chiefs have to go to, to scrape up the resources to pay for a very large force structure. And we end up accepting—unconsciously—a lot of risk in areas that I thought were disadvantageous for the future.
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