Phillip Dolitsky
The recent shuttering of the Office of Net Assessment marks the end of an era at the Pentagon, closing the book on one of the few institutions that helped America think beyond the present moment. Whatever replaces it—whether it’s a restructured version of the same office or a new entity altogether (perhaps something with a name like the Office of Strategic Advantage)—will face a challenge far greater than mere bureaucratic reorganization: the modern strategist is drowning in information.
Crafting good military strategy requires slow, deliberate judgment and creativity, away from the noise of the present. Today, however, the strategist is often expected to function less like a grandmaster at a chessboard, creatively calculating future moves, and more like a stock trader, reacting in real-time to an unceasing flood of open-source intelligence, social media updates and political noise. The temptation to prioritize the immediate over the enduring, the transient over the real, is a relentless struggle in our digital age, and the sheer volume of information often obscures the truths that actually matter.
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