A History of the Third Offset, 2014-2018

📖 The Scoop

The Third Offset emerged at a time of transition within the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). In 2014, the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq seemed to be winding down. At the same time, it had become clear to U.S. defense planners that for the previous two decades, while the U.S. military was concentrated on Afghanistan and Iraq, China and Russia had significantly increased their warfighting capabilities. The aim of the Third Offset, as envisioned by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert O. Work, one of its key creators and advocates, was to draw on U.S. advanced technologies to offset China's and Russia's technological advances. This report documents the history of the Third Offset from 2014 to 2018. A key finding in this history is that the Third Offset was less a military strategy for offsetting what were perceived to be the recently acquired military advantages of China and Russia and more a mechanism for intellectual change within DoD at a time when changes in thinking about future warfare were needed. As a result, this history focuses on institutional efforts to effect change within DoD and the key defense leaders who strove to bring that change to fruition. These efforts were successful in that the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) embraced many of the fundamental tenets of technological advances and organizational changes developed by the Third Offset. In that sense, this history provides an example of how to effect organizational and process changes in large military institutions like DoD.

Genre: Computers / Artificial Intelligence / General (fancy, right?)