Congress has formed a new advisory committee of top defense thinkers, in order to provide a pathway forward for the Department of Defense…

The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017 established a Commission on the National Defense Strategy of The United States. 

The leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services committees have appointed members to a panel meant to make recommendations on the country’s national security strategy.

The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments has appointed Barbara Humpton, Randy Forbes and Adam Frankel to its board of directors. CSBA President and CEO Thomas Mahnken, said in a statement that the convergence of military and economic instruments is crucial to the national security debate and the new board members’ experiences reflect this intersection.

The president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Tom Mahnken, recently stated in congressional testimony that “wars of the future may no longer lie that far in the future and that these wars are likely to differ considerably both from the great-power wars of the past as well as the campaigns that we have been waging since the turn of the millennium.” Regardless of which strategy or strategies are chosen by governments in this potential return to great power competition, the competitive edge generated by highly professional military personnel honed to individual and collective excellence must be a foundational element. Mastering the profession of arms will be one of the cornerstones of military organizations that seek to successfully prosecute operations in the age of digital warfare.

The Trump administration has inherited a military that, while engaged worldwide in defense of America’s interests, has been suffering from the combination of high operational tempo and the corrosive effects of sequestration.