The Decisive Decade: Building Enduring Advantage
Creating a Balance of Power that Underpins a Free, Open, and Stable International System
Held 8-9 February 2023 at Joint Base Andrews
Conference Description
President Joseph Biden has called this the “Decisive Decade,” defined by dramatic changes in geopolitics, technology, economics, and the environment. Strategic choices made now will set the course for decades to come. Going into the Decisive Decade, the recently published 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) mentions advancing US goals by integrated deterrence, campaigning, and other “actions that build enduring advantages.” It calls for protecting the United States and allies, expanding prosperity, defending democratic values, and seizing new strategic opportunities.”
Similarly, the Joint Concept for Integrated Campaigning (JCIC) highlights “the need for proactive, on-going campaigning that adjusts to fluid policy environments and changing conditions to create favorable and sustainable outcomes.” In addition to force generation, acquisition processes, and speeding technology and capability deployment, the requirement to build enduring advantages underpins competition across the continuum and lies at the very heart of proactive, on-going campaigning.
This SMA Conference will explore the ways the US and partners together can build enduring advantages through persistent, integrated campaigning across warfighting domains, theaters, the peace-to-war competitive continuum, and other instruments of national power. In execution, this is a huge intellectual and bureaucratic lift but a necessary imperative if we are to create favorable and sustainable outcomes while addressing the challenges of the Decisive Decade and beyond.
Panel 1: Opening Moves in a New Competitive Era – Historical Lessons for Getting Them Right
The United States’ unipolar moment since winning the Cold War has ended, and we have entered a new era of competition. The world has seen the opening phases of many new eras—1555, 1648, 1713, 1815, 1871, 1918 or 1945 to name just a few—all distinctive but also sharing common themes. The opening phases of the Cold War through to the 1950s, for example, saw the United States take economic, political, military and technological choices that built enduring advantage for the rest of the Cold War. The United States now finds itself making opening moves in our latest historical era. What might history tell us about the opening moves it might take this time?
Moderator: Dr. Nicholas Wright (Intelligent Biology). Panelists: Dr. Eliot Cohen (Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies), Dr. Kori Schake (AEI), Dr. Sergey Radchenko (Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies)
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Panel 2: Decisive Alliances for Enduring Advantage
Alliances are a source of enduring advantage. If Germany had collaborated even a fraction as well as the Allies in WWII, it could easily have knocked the Soviet Union out of the war—and won. In the Cold War, alliances like NATO, the US-Japan alliance and the “Five Eyes” helped give the United States a winning hand. But our new era of competition is not WWII or the Cold War—and how can alliances be made to work once more so powerfully in United States’ favor? Effective collaboration requires knowing each partner’s distinct—as well as shared—national interests, perspectives, strengths, weaknesses, fears, and hopes. Can the United States shape decisive alliances?
Moderator: Michael Miklaucic (NDU). Panelists: MG (Ret) Bengt Svensson (Swedish Defence University), Tsiporah Fried (French Joint Staff), Masashi Murano (Hudson Institute), Dr. Tanvi Madan (Brookings Institute)
The recording of this panel is limited to US govt only. Please email Mariah.c.yager.ctr@mail.mil from your official US govt email.
Panel 3: Shifting International Norms: Natural Evolution or a Battle for Leadership?
The infrastructure and institutions of the rules-based international order were constructed largely by Western powers following WWII. Are these institutions—whether treaties, legal agreements, or collective expectations of acceptable behavior—really under attack or, like the principle of strict national sovereignty, are we seeing a natural evolution in collective thought? International norms constrain many categories of state interaction, including those like arms control, nuclear non-proliferation, laws of war and state sovereign rights, with direct implications for US and partner national security interests. Which norms are inviolable? Which can be softened or altered? How must the US and like-minded states respond in order to retain norms leadership?
Moderator: Joesph Cyrulik (Strategic Futures Group) Panelists: Jon Bateman (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), Elisabeth Braw (AEI), Dr. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross (Valens Global, Foundation for Defense of Democracies), Dr. James Giordano (Georgetown University)
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Panel 4: Mind-Tech Nexus: How can New Tech Support a 21st century Patton, Nimitz, Marshall, Their Staffs, and Their Human Warfighters?
New technologies aim to extend decision makers’ situational awareness through artificial intelligence (AI) and digital networks that connect myriad sensors. Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) seeks to integrate sensors from across the military services. DARPA’s Mosaic Warfare aims “to fight as a system of systems” “at mission speed.” DoD programs even aim to harness ocean life as a network of billions of living, self-replicating sensors. Yet systems feeding ever more information to human decision-makers is just half the equation: Humans possess incredible perceptual and information processing capabilities, but they remain humans with cognitive limits to what they can process and how they decide. Tech can extend powerful human capabilities and exacerbate human fallibilities. Thus, this panel asks: how can these new sensor, networking and AI technologies interface most effectively with the very human commanders and warfighters?
Moderator: Lt Gen (Ret) Jack Shanahan. Panelists: RADM Douglas Small (Naval Information Warfare Systems Command), Maj Gen Matthew Dinmore (16th Air Force), Dr. Tim Grayson (SAF)
The recording of this panel is by request only. Please email Mariah.c.yager.ctr@mail.mil to view the recording.
Panel 5: Multi-Domain, Integrated Influence.
Military operations and coercive power are two sources of power of a broader set: the means to influence the operational environment in ways that will be advantageous to US and partner security objectives in the future. Thinking “integrated influence” rather than “integrated deterrence” opens the doors of artificial institutional silos that too often limit development of comprehensive campaigns to defend US security along with other national interests. It facilitates true integration of US capabilities across DIME-FIL+allies. This panel explores some of the multiple non-military sources of influence that arguably, are more appropriate for building the durable, trust-based relationships that shape the operational environment. In addition to representatives from the Department of State and USAID, it includes representatives of other executive departments with “foreign service” elements that also defend US interests and values, including the US Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS), which has nearly 100 offices worldwide that work to enhance export and global food security. The Department of the Treasury Office of the Under Secretary for International Affairs employs economic levers to defend US interests and retain US leadership in global economy affairs. Likewise, the Commerce Department’s Foreign Commercial Service consists of international trade and investment exerts defending US trade and forging international trade relationships. Finally, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Global Affairs administers important global health security and health diplomacy programs offering US expertise, “to develop the foundation for diplomatic relations in other sectors.”
Moderator: Dr. Michael Mazarr (RAND). Panelists: Vanessa Cofield (CISA), Greg Gatjanis (Dept of Treasury), Kevin Kurland (Dept of Commerce), Kate Neeper (USAGM), Dan Flynn (ODNI), Mira Resnick (Dept of State)
The recording of this panel is limited to US govt only. Please email Mariah.c.yager.ctr@mail.mil from your official US govt email.
Panel 6: Know Thyself: Blue Reflection & Audience Participation
On this panel, we want to shift our gaze from the geostrategic environment and the constellation of threats to one of self-reflection and the future. Many of our intellectual frameworks and bureaucratic structures were built for another time and very different geostrategic landscape. Our ability to change and adapt often seems overmatched by the increasing complexity and sophistication of the world in which we must operate. As a result, our strategies too often underperform and test the limits of our power. Fostering innovation or simply studying the threats without disciplined self-reflection is insufficient and inhibits our ability to undertake fundamental and necessary change. It engenders reactive vice proactive strategy formulation. The aim is not self-flagellation but to find opportunities through self-awareness and be willing to take risks in pursuit of informed change—the decisive decade demands it.
Moderator Todd Veazie (SMA). Panelists: Dr. Anthony Cordesman (Center for Strategic and International Studies), Robert Jones (SOCOM), Dr. David Kilcullen (New America), LTG (Ret) Michael Nagata (CACI)
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Day 2 Panel 7: Command Panel
Today’s Combatant Commands face the difficulty of deterring two peer adversaries at the same time, who must be deterred differently, both possessing the ability to unilaterally escalate a conflict to any level of violence, in any domain, worldwide, at any time, with any instrument of national power. In response, there is broad consensus regarding the need for integration of the instruments of national power to include military, economic, informational, and diplomatic power through the use of campaigning to strengthen deterrence and enable the United States and its partners to gain advantages against the full range of competitors’ coercive actions. This panel of experts from the CCMDs will address how these challenges affect them.
Moderator: Dr. Hriar Cabayan (LLNL) Panelists: Michael Clark (CYBERCOM), Kayse Jansen (STRATCOM), Robert Jones (SOCOM), James Krakar (EUCOM), Col David Walker (CENTCOM)
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Previous Conferences
2019 Proceedings of the 12th Annual SMA Conference and 2019 Biographies
2018 Proceedings of the 11th Annual SMA Conference and 2018 Biographies