An Odyssey, Not a Career: Navigating the Age of Chaos
There is a moment early in my conversation with Stephen Kuper on Defence Connect’s Contested Ground podcast when he asks me a routine question, the kind any interviewer asks a guest with a long résumé. Give us a rundown of your career to date. My answer arrived immediately, and it reframed everything that followed: “I’ve never had a career. I have an odyssey.”
It was not a throwaway line. Across thirty-five minutes, Kuper drew out a portrait of a working method that has remained consistent for five decades even as the world I study has been unrecognizable at the start and end of nearly every decade of it. I joined the podcast from Sydney partway through my twice-yearly stint as a research fellow with the Sir Richard Williams Foundation, and Kuper introduced me as “a veteran of Washington” and “one of the most prolific defense thinkers and strategic policy writers in the world.” But the more interesting story Kuper drew out of me was not the résumé itself — the PhD from Columbia in 1974, the years working for Zbigniew Brzezinski, the sixty-plus books, the Pentagon years, the decades of field research spanning Europe, the United States, and Australia. The more interesting story is the method underneath the résumé: a lifelong insistence on working from evidence to theory, never the reverse, and a corresponding impatience with strategists who do it backward.
Next year I’ll be publishing my co-autobiography with Kenneth Maxwell, entitled Two Twentieth Century Men in the 21st Century: The Decades. My conversation with Steve in May, while I was in Australia, anticipated some of what Ken and I write about in that book. But of course we discussed a great deal more as well, and I want to use this piece to highlight some of what we covered in that podcast.
Field Research as First Principle
My account of my own formation is unusually candid about how much of it was accidental. A Columbia PhD in 1974. Work for Brzezinski in Washington. A French wife, which pulled me into decades of engagement with Europe well before the marriage itself. In the 1980s, hands-on work on the Euromissile crisis. In the 1990s, work on the custodianship of Soviet nuclear weapons after the collapse of the USSR, alongside naval, Marine Corps, and Air Force issues. From 2004, involvement in standing up fifth-generation fighter aircraft. It is a career, if I insist on the word, built almost entirely on being present in Washington, in Europe, in the Pacific rather than on any single institutional perch.
What makes this add up to something more than a scrapbook of postings, I told Kuper, is a methodological commitment: “What’s unique about what I do is I bring a broader strategic focus to a lot of field research. I’m dissatisfied with just strategic thinking without evidence, and so I tend to work from cases to theory, and that tends to be my approach.” It’s a small sentence carrying a large argument, and it recurs, in different forms, throughout the conversation. I’m not interested in grand theorizing that floats free of what is actually happening on flight lines, in acquisition offices, in embassies, and in operations centers. I want the theory to be earned by the casework first.
This is also, not incidentally, an explanation for the sheer volume of my published output. Kuper remarked, with evident astonishment, on discovering “how many books you have written over the past couple of decades” and I put the figure at sixty-plus, spanning roughly thirty years, a number large enough that Routledge has been reissuing several of my Cold War–era titles from the 1980s and early 1990s for a new generation of readers. My explanation for the volume is not vanity but method: each book is downstream of a body of field research, and the research itself is continuous, conducted through outlets — Second Line of Defense (sldinfo.com) and Defense.info — that exist, in my words, because “we have too much content” for one platform to hold. My current focus, which I call “the age of chaos,” is itself a product of having gone back and reread my own work from the 1980s against the work I’ve done in the last three or four years, testing whether the analytical frameworks of one era still describe the next.
That habit of testing old frameworks against new facts is, arguably, the single thread that ties the entire conversation together and it’s worth pausing on, because it distinguishes my self-description from the more conventional “thought leader” biography Kuper’s introduction might have set up. I’m not presenting myself as someone who arrived at a fixed doctrine and has been defending it ever since. I’m presenting myself as someone whose operating discipline is to keep re-litigating my own conclusions against what the ground is currently telling me.
No Great Powers, No Cold War 2.0
Kuper steered the conversation toward the historic transition question that frames the whole episode: is the post–Second World War order fraying, and if so, toward what? My answer begins by discarding a term most commentators use without a second thought. “I start from the proposition that there are no great powers,” I told Kuper. “The idea of great power competition is, I think, wrong, because great powers is a term that comes from the 18th century. There are no such powers. There are major powers, certainly… and there are a lot of middle powers.” It was a deliberately provocative opening move, and it set up the rest of my argument: that the conventional vocabulary of international relations, great powers, alliances as fixed pieces of paper, a bipolar or even multipolar “world order” in the old sense, is simply the wrong vocabulary for what is actually happening.
What is actually happening, in my telling, is a fifteen-plus-year rise of what I call “the multipolar authoritarian world”, a parallel universe of states that observe the rules-based order only when convenient, China being my chief example, set against a bloc of liberal democratic states that I accuse of having grown complacent: giving away manufacturing, underinvesting in defense, and indulging in what I bluntly call internal fighting over history and all while failing to notice they were in a global competition. The task ahead, as I framed it to Kuper, is not restoration of the old order but the construction of “a competitive coexistence strategy in a world that’s radically different.”
When Kuper pressed me on whether this competitive coexistence resembles a “Cold War 2.0,” I rejected the analogy outright. The original Cold War, I argued, was fundamentally bimodal — the United States and the Soviet Union, each with genuinely global aspirations, “and both sets of global aspirations are gone.” I recalled my own first professional publication, an article on post-industrial society written in a 1970s New York I described as having then been “a vibrant intellectual capital, which it isn’t anymore,” and connected that early preoccupation with characterizing a new era to my present one: coining, tentatively, the term “resilient pluralism” for the moment strategists now need to describe. I was explicit that the term is a work in progress, “I’m struggling with that one”, which is itself characteristic of how I operate: I’d rather hold a concept loosely and keep testing it than declare a finished doctrine. My parting shot on this point was aimed squarely at my own profession: strategists, I said, keep instinctively “focus[ing] in on Donald Trump and focus[ing] on restoring a world that’s gone” rather than doing the harder work of imagining the world that has to be built.
The Case Against the Gray Zone
One term draws particular scorn from me, and it happens to be the concept baked into the podcast’s own title. “One of my bête noirs is the gray zone,” I told Kuper. “That is a concept that makes no sense to me because we live in the gray zone.” It’s a pointed remark to make on a show called Contested Ground — subtitled, in its own opening, around “exposing the strategies and tactics of gray zone warfare” — and my objection is not merely semantic. My argument is that treating the gray zone as a discrete space beneath a threshold of conventional conflict implies there is a clean, well-lit zone above it where things are simple and rules-based. For me, that clean zone never really existed in the way strategists assume, and treating today’s ambiguity as an aberration rather than the normal condition of state competition leads planners to keep waiting for a return to clarity that is not coming.
Facts First, Interpretation Later
Perhaps the clearest articulation of my method in the entire conversation comes when I describe my own habit of collecting specific, under-examined developments and refusing to force them into a pre-existing story. I invoke Sherlock Holmes explicitly: “You have to do this analysis, like Sherlock Holmes. Watson would discover a fact, and Sherlock would say, ‘I don’t know what it means, but I’m just going to dock the fact.'” My complaint about the wider strategist community is that too few of them are doing the Watson work at all, gathering discrete, hard facts, let alone the harder Holmesian work of withholding premature interpretation.
I offered a string of examples to illustrate the point, each chosen because it is, in my estimation, underreported relative to its significance. The 2024 defense agreement between Australia and Indonesia, which most Americans have never heard of and which I tie to an amphibious exercise conducted in territory Australia once occupied, a non-classical alliance arrangement I read as an emerging security and deterrence web oriented on the Malacca Strait. The rebuilding of Filipino defense capacity around maritime autonomous systems, small boats, and missiles, undertaken by the United States and Japan together with U.S. Marine Corps Special Operations forces and MARTAC. The visit to Australia by the Japanese Prime Minister and the agreements she signed in Washington, which I read as evidence that Japan is building its own independent contribution to Indo-Pacific defense not simply drawing on American guarantees in ways that don’t map onto the familiar vocabulary of ANZUS or AUKUS. And the “Pax Silica” agreements — a Trump administration–driven framework bringing together roughly fourteen states around security, raw materials, and AI — which I raised at a recent meeting of prominent strategists only to find that nobody in the room recognized the term.
The larger point of the Holmes analogy is not any single one of these facts but my insistence that “it’s a question of looking at how these things add up” without prejudging the sum in advance. I credit my friend Paul Bracken, author of The Second Nuclear Age, with an intellectual formulation I find clarifying: that in political science, alliances are treated as pieces of paper and formal agreements, whereas in game theory, alliances are treated as cooperation on issues that matter to the specific players involved in a specific problem. My own view lands closer to the game-theoretic reading, a world moving toward “some kind of mixed environment” in which the old assumption that treaty commitments obligate behavior regardless of interest is, in my words, simply a misreading of “how states behave.”
Alliances After Unipolarity
Kuper pushed me on whether American power’s relative decline against rising competitors means alliances are becoming less valuable or more essential. My answer resists the binary. I locate part of the problem in an American assumption formed by two successive experiences of unipolarity after the Second World War and again in the 1990s that hardened, in my telling, into an unexamined belief in permanent American primacy. I place myself inside the internal Pentagon dissent of the mid-2000s, recalling that I was “part of an administration where several of us were essentially disagreeing with President George W. Bush on what he was going to do in Iraq and Afghanistan,” precisely because that cohort doubted the United States was preparing for the global competition already visible by 2008.
At the same time, I hold allies to account for their own underinvestment, tying it to what I describe as a liberal-economic assumption that treated security and defense as an externality to economic policy rather than its foundation, a framework I say has been “blown apart by reality” in Australia’s own recent reckoning with energy security. My prescription is not disengagement from alliances but a shift in what they are asked to do: core allies providing genuine self-defense capability, networked together across varying thresholds of cooperation, rather than expecting Washington to underwrite the entire architecture. I point to closer Japan–Australia–South Korea collaboration in the Pacific as the more sustainable model, arguing that this kind of pluralistic, distributed alliance structure is precisely what a would-be condominium power, my direct characterization of Chinese strategy toward the United States, cannot easily leverage or divide.
Asked by Kuper whether this resembles a modern echo of the Treaty of Tordesillas — the sixteenth-century line splitting the unclaimed world between Spain and Portugal — I allow the comparison is “not too far fetched,” while noting that China’s own difficulties complicate any simple bipolar carve-up.
The Economy Is the Defense Strategy
If there is a single argument I want an Australian defense audience to sit with, it is that the country’s defense debate has been asking the wrong central question. “Too much of the strained defense discussion has been about the ADF and what the ADF will look like in 2040,” I said and I consider that entire exercise close to meaningless. “I don’t think anybody can design a 2040 business plan,” I told Kuper, recalling having once asked a defense planner how accurately they had predicted 2019 and 2020. The answer, unsurprisingly, was not well. I illustrate the deeper point with a small personal anecdote: one summer at my French in-laws’ house, I found three books published in the 1890s that attempted to predict the twentieth century and read all three not to marvel at what they got right but to absorb “this whole problem of when you’re in your own culture, trying to imagine what will happen, how hard it is.”
The question I want asked instead is what kind of society and economy Australia intends to be a generation from now and only then, what defense structure would protect and sustain that economy rather than drain it. Kuper credited the late Major General Jim Molan with having pushed a “whole of society” reconceptualization of national security along these lines, one that gained real traction during COVID before Australia largely forgot the lesson and reverted to treating fuel security and similar crises as isolated problems rather than symptoms. Kuper, then noted the well-known structural critique of Australian procurement — the same number of destroyers, frigates, submarines, combat aircraft, and infantry regiments as in 1987, despite rhetoric describing the current moment as the most dangerous since the Second World War. I agreed, framing it as a subset of my larger argument: a good idea or program that doesn’t change enterprise behavior will have limited impact regardless of its merits.
I offer space policy as my sharpest illustration of Australia’s compartmentalized thinking. A government that treats “space and defense” as a dead-end conversation and won’t fund it will nonetheless celebrate a “Made in Australia” push framed as green industrial policy, missing that Australia’s equatorial and Antarctic launch geography represents a genuine, underexploited commercial space asset, including as potential launch support for a Japan that lacks good launch positioning of its own.
My broader complaint about acquisition reform follows the same logic: software-defined platforms like the F-35 don’t fit an acquisition model built around fixed requirements, because “you can’t do requirements for code.” For less permanent, more iterative systems like maritime autonomous vessels, I argue the only workable model pairs an end-user group directly with a company able to deliver within budget, citing Australia’s Maritime Border Command, which I have written about after interviewing its commanding officer, as a functioning example of exactly this hybrid approach. I extend the same argument to the CH-53K King Stallion, which I describe as the first all-digital military aircraft ever built and the first capable of predictive maintenance, a program I had just visited at the training squadron in New River before recording the podcast, and note the friction this creates: an aircraft and its operating squadron can be smarter than the parts-buying enterprise around them, and today it is the machine that gets dumbed down to fit the bureaucracy, not the other way around. The deeper shift, as I see it, is that the commercial sector has flipped from being a follower of military innovation in the 1980s to being its primary source today which is precisely why I think Australia’s underlying commercial manufacturing base, not any single platform decision, is “the most fundamental defense change” the country actually needs.
Closing on the AI Question
Asked the closing question Kuper says he puts to every guest — what is the one thing we are not talking about that we should be — my answer circles back to where the whole conversation began: the primacy of economic and human capability over platforms. I call the AI revolution “real” and “very significant,” and I argue that a country with as few people relative to its territory as Australia has no better available tool for multiplying the effective power of its population. I’m careful to register a caveat from another friend and interlocutor, John Blackburn, who worries about the disruptive mutations AI could introduce, a concern I say I accept rather than dismiss. But my own emphasis lands on education fundamentals, whether people are actually learning mathematics and English at the level a genuinely AI-capable society requires and I offer a wry personal footnote: as an undergraduate I took two years of symbolic logic that classmates found bewildering, not realizing at the time that symbolic logic is the intellectual foundation of the very technology now reshaping my field.
I end on the same note I opened with: impatience with governments that promise transformation on a distant horizon rather than delivering results now. “I just don’t believe in governments that promise me a better world in 15 years,” I told Kuper. “Show me next year, two years from now, three years from now, a result.” It is a demand for evidence, offered by someone whose entire method — across five decades, sixty-plus books, and a body of field research spanning Washington, Europe, and the Pacific — has been built on refusing to accept a conclusion until the facts on the ground have earned it.