Offset-X Evolved: A Technology-Powered Strategy for the U.S. Military
SCSP's Best Advice to the National Defense Strategy Team
Hello, I’m Ylli Bajraktari, CEO of the Special Competitive Studies Project. As the Department of War readies its new National Defense Strategy, we are releasing two relevant, and hopefully useful products.
The first, Offset-X Evolved, explores the transformation in geopolitics, technology, and warfare, and proposes a technology-powered strategy for the U.S. military - centered on a triad of sensors, AI, and autonomy. The second one is a collection of short papers by some of our defense advisors, who draw on decades of experience to outline the most pressing issues the next National Defense Strategy must confront. Each paper offers practical advice to the Secretary of War on how to address the challenges and seize the opportunities the U.S. military faces. You can read both products on our website. As always, we welcome and appreciate your feedback.
Offset-X Evolved
Since 2022, when we published our first Offset-X strategy, the transformative changes that the United States faces across strategic, technological, and warfare realms have only intensified and accelerated. The era of Great Power competition is giving way to an era of confrontation, with a new axis of disruptors—China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—waging a relentless campaign against U.S. interests, America’s leadership position, and the vision of free nations as the destiny of humankind. In the realm of technology, the age of AI is here with direct implications not only for our economy, education, health, and society, but also national security and warfare. The United States ushered in the age of AI and continues to be at the forefront of innovation, but the race for the final frontiers of AI and values that will govern its use remain a fulcrum of competition. And when it comes to war, we are witnessing the dawn of automated wars. Informational, decisional, and lethal advantage are increasingly being powered by and dependent upon algorithmic and autonomous systems. This is not just the promise of technology, it is the battlefield dynamics that are necessitating it.
Mindful of these dynamics, and the dangers associated with this decade, we decided to revisit and evolve the original Offset-X strategy. Countless visits to Ukrainian frontlines, repeated engagements with Taiwanese officials, a series of table top exercises with technologists and policymakers, four defense summits on innovation and national security with senior most military leaders of the United States, and insights from more than one hundred officials from government, industry, private capital, allies, and academia fed into the development of this new Offset-X Evolved report.
The sentiments were clear:
The future of warfare is not coming in five or ten years. It is already here, unfolding most obviously and daily in the battlefields of Ukraine, as well as across the digital domain. And allied militaries are not ready for this type of warfare. If a war is forced upon the United States, particularly around the Taiwan Strait, we run the risk of losing it. The report offers a premortem of why the United States could lose.
The United States, and our allies and partners, must recognize that we are now in an Era of Confrontation. We are not merely competing with our rivals and adversaries. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are uniting in their intent and harmonizing their disruptive actions to end America’s global leadership.
At a time of monumental challenges and overtaxed resources, the United States military should adopt an Offset Strategy. The age of American hyperpower ended with the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq. Primacy against all adversaries requires allocation of significant amounts of resources over a sustained period of time - something that the United States would be hard pressed, fiscally and politically, to generate. And restraint fundamentally misunderstands the nature of today’s challenges—their interconnectedness and their potency to cross national boundaries and hop domains.
To implement an Offset strategy, the report proposes conceptual, institutional, and budgetary changes for the Department of War:
Designing, resourcing, and executing a new Joint Warfighting Concept that rests on a triad of three core capabilities: Sensing, Artificial Intelligence, and Autonomy. When adopted as an integrated system, these capabilities would deliver three advantages that are fundamental to prevailing in the type of warfare that the United States could face this decade—informational, decisional, and lethality advantage.
Adopting a posture of dynamic deterrence to deter and respond to acts of coercion. The United States would field large numbers of cheaper but smarter autonomous vehicles sufficient to persistently deploy in the underwater, surface, air, and land domains. Large quantities of autonomous equipment would offer multi-axis force presentations and create operational dilemmas for our adversaries. Equally, being present and scalable empowers the United States to seize the initiative and capture operational momentum from its adversaries when desired, as desired.
The defense enterprise should embrace a production mindset, shifting from stockpiling to ability to produce, including building up latent capacity to quickly scale capabilities. This is not to suggest that the U.S. military should not maintain stockpiles of critical weapons or resources—they remain essential for readiness. Rather, the mindset that has guided defense acquisitions since the Cold War – one that assumes longevity, incremental updates, and the indefinite relevance of expensive platforms - no longer fits today’s strategic or technological realities. Instead, we need a production mindset as an essential element of our strategic depth.
The defense enterprise is also in need of cohering innovation endeavors. One potential model could be the creation of a Joint Warfare and Innovation Command, empowered with authorities to drive integrated concept development, emerging capability acquisition, and force design.
This consolidation would also need to to include creation of a flexible and dedicated innovation budget, beginning with at least 1% of the Department of War topline and increasing over future years. Granting the Secretary of War— in close coordination with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—discretionary authority over this innovation fund would enable the rapid launch of high-impact pilot programs, the scaling of promising prototypes, the strategic pursuit of evolving technologies, and the agility needed to operate within the reality of Congressional continuing resolutions.
Finally, as warfare moves beyond land, sea, air, cyber, and space into the digital and cognitive domain, the U.S. defense enterprise would be well-served to stand up a Digital Warfare Corps and a U.S. Digital Command to defend and fight in the digital domain. As adversaries increasingly wage cyber operations, deploy advanced AI-enabled systems, and exploit data as a weapon, the United States must organize for this new battlespace with the same seriousness it has applied over years to land, sea, air, and space operations. Importantly, the Corps and the Command would serve as a powerful mechanism for recruiting, training, and retaining top-tier technical talent—individuals who might otherwise be lost to the private sector.
Best Advice to the National Defense Strategy Team
In addition to our Offset-X Evolved report, we also asked some of our Senior Advisors to write one piece of advice to the team at the Department of War who are drafting the new National Defense Strategy (NDS). The NDS is one of the most consequential documents in U.S. defense policy that articulates policy priorities, guides force planning, and signals to allies and adversaries alike how the United States intends to meet its security challenges. And each of the advisors has served with distinction in a variety of capacities and high-level policy roles - in the Executive or Legislative Branch — over several decades. In these papers, they not only identify the areas of greatest strategic importance but also offer their best defense advice for how policymakers can best address them to ensure the United States remains secure and prepared for the future.
The agenda for AI Unlocked is officially live!
We are excited to share the agenda for AI Unlocked, our two-day event filled with innovation and creativity.
On Friday, October 3, we'll dive deep into "AI+ Policy" and "AI+ Tech Frontiers," with discussions on how AI is shaping national strategy and solving real-world problems. Featured speakers include The Honorable Rob Wittman, The Honorable Don Beyer, Maithra Raghu, and more. Space is limited!
Then, on Saturday, October 4, bring the whole family for "AI+ Discovery," an outdoor festival exploring how AI is integrated into arts, science, and more. Enjoy interactive activities, food, and entertainment. Featured speakers include Refik Anadol, Dr. Nina Kottler, Sasha Stiles, and more.
Check out the full agenda and register at https://www.scsp.ai/ai-unlocked/. We look forward to seeing you there!