America’s national security structure remains hampered by Service parochialism and agency special interests and is seemingly beyond the control of Congress or the White House. Accordingly, it can continue to meet today’s challenges in last century’s fashion, often resorting to force and draining fiscal resources while damaging the Nation’s soft power. Alternately, it can shrink from global engagement which, while attractive on its face, could also erode soft power and land Washington in an unfavorable security environment. The contention here is that the United States must revamp its security bureaucracy, creating a civilian-led interagency structure with the authority, oversight, and funding to act at the regional level, applying all U.S. instruments of power, including military, within given geographical areas.

No force design can guarantee success, but an agile design may reduce risk and maximize options across today’s range of security needs. Smaller force packages that can be adapted to fluid situations will court disaster less than large, costly installations in fixed locations such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly in this age of proliferating WMD. A maneuver-strike-sustainment complex is outlined that will reduce expense and at the same time be the foundation of a unified view of warfare that is missing at present. The new vision will lead to strategic power that will endure even in the face of the WMD threat that makes current force configurations so dangerous

Technology diffusion, geostrategic changes, and a proliferation of well-armed adversaries are forcing Washington to deal with a mix of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism and at the same time provide against traditional challenges. Taken together, these factors are brewing a "perfect storm" that will not be adequately addressed by current attempts to balance investments between traditional combined arms warfare with complex operations. This toxic combination will take more than incremental changes to fix, and a few writers along with parts of the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review touch on the scope of this largely unappreciated danger. The authors call for necessity-driven experimentation—vigorous and competitive exploration of ideas to aid in making "once-in-a-century" decisions