The Two-War Framework Debate

Military strategists Dr. Frank G. Hoffman (retired) and Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria II analyze the 2026 National Defense Strategy. 

Host (Stephanie Crider)

You are listening to Decisive Point. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

I’m talking with Dr. Frank G. Hoffman and Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria II today.

Hoffman is the author of “The Next National Defense Strategy: Mission-Based Force Planning,” which was published in the Summer 2025 issue of Parameters. He recently retired from the federal government after more than 46 years of service as a Marine, civil servant, and senior Pentagon official. His last post was at the Institute for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University.

Echevarria is currently a professor of strategy at the US Army War College. He’s held the General Douglas MacArthur Chair of Research and the Elihu Root Chair of Military Studies and is the author of six books on military strategy.

So, Dr. Hoffman, a lot has happened since we published your article. I’m really looking forward to this conversation today. My first question, in fact, did you get what you were hoping for from the new National Defense Strategy [NDS]?

Dr. Frank G. Hoffman

Yes, [I am] satisfied. I have a certain sympathy for folks who write strategy documents, and so, I know how difficult it is, and I know that these documents have to talk to many audiences. And, you know, you could chop up the 10, 12 pages of actual texts of the summary that’s out there and see that it’s talking to the White House, that it’s talking to allies, it’s talking to adversaries, it’s talking to commercial vendors. I mean, it has a lot of audiences, and I’ve seen a lot of criticisms, and I’m sympathetic because I’ve been in the shoes of [those] trying to edit or craft a couple of these in my prior life.

But, I was pleased with the framework. It has some clarity to it. I think like Dr. E. [Echevarria], I took out all the op [operations] art terminology from the 2018 Strategy, things like lines of effort and things that aren’t as strategic, and I tried to, you know, visualize a theory of success for our strategy. And, I don’t get that necessarily out of these four elements, but the way they are clearly stated and prioritized, I agree with that, and it’s largely in sync with my article—with some improvements.

Host

I feel very fortunate to have two such esteemed strategists in the studio with me today, and I'm curious how each of you see theory informing the recently published NDS.

And also, where do theory and force planning realities collide most sharply?

Hoffman

On the theoretical part, dealing with strategy per se, you know, one of the things I’ve written about, I think Dr. E’s written about [it], too, is the importance of a theory of success, which I think deals with the ways of a strategy.

Of course, it’s also important to have coherence between the ends, ways, and the means. One of the reasons I was writing my article over a year ago was the insolvency problem, which really deals with the means gap.

So, I don’t see an overarching integrated theory of success for the four elements, but I do see—particularly for the China component of the strategy—a clear theory of success expressed. The foundation for that was in the 2018 Strategy. It’s [from] some of Mr. [Elbridge A.] Colby’s writings in his book in the past. So, I see that imprinted in there, and that’s the part of theory that I see practically employed in the Strategy.

But I do think that the NDS Summary, as I understand it—I understand it’s just a shell and the budget hasn’t been submitted, but I don’t see the Strategy as written for closing the insolvency gap very much. It’s not a compelling or persuasive story for Congress to fund the gaps that I’ve seen in the past, which are mentioned in the Strategy. The president has talked about a very large increase in the means, but I haven’t seen that submitted to the Hill. And this Strategy won’t lift up the attention of Congress on what to do with that money. It’s sort of written as a strategy that makes trade-offs that are pretty clear about Europe for Asia and the Middle East and things. It’s a strategy that’s largely trying to make [the most of] the harsh, constrained resources, which is applaudable, but it’s not a compelling story for a change if that’s what the president really wants.

Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria II

From my standpoint, the theory and strategy mix has to do with our basic assumptions and how those are informed by a theory as a foundation. Even if we aren’t consciously thinking about a particular kind of theory as we’re trying to write a strategy, I think we are informed by the assumptions that are built into a theoretical approach and so on.

But I think Frank is right that one of the things that I did not see in this NDS was closing the gap. The $36 trillion, I think, is what you cited in your article last year, and the last number I saw was $38 trillion in debt.

Hoffman

It goes up $7 million an hour.

Echevarria

Yeah, so some serious effort is needed there, but maybe that will be forthcoming, and a plan to get there will be forthcoming in the upcoming months or something. I don’t know. We’ll see, I suppose.

Host

I’d love to hear about your thoughts on the two-war framework. Is it obsolete? Is it misapplied? And if it is, what should replace it?

Hoffman

I spent a lot of time [on this topic]. In fact, that was largely the motivation for writing that particular article. I’d have to go back to an article that Dr. Echevarria edited, I think in the 2016 time period, where I wrote my first two MTW [two major theater wars] article, and I’m in favor of giving a president options.

Presidents don’t want to be constrained if they can afford it. And so, you know, most of my time in the Pentagon, we’ve dealt with a two MRC [major regional conflict] or some version where we’re trying to give the presidents, you know, optionality. And so, my offer, because I was trying to close the gap in defense spending, was to say we’re gonna do one MRC, or war, unilaterally, and we’re going to do one with allies.

And [I] published that article and actually got called to see the Secretary of Defense to talk about that article in 2017, and he totally disagreed with me because, historically, we’ve always gone to war with allies. So, saying we’re going to do something unilaterally doesn’t do much strategically or historically. And in fact, it lets allies off, which for the last 10 years we’ve been trying to get allies to do more for themselves—and ourselves—for our collective aim. So, that was my motivation for writing that. I’ve dealt with the debate inside the Pentagon about all the things we’re trying to pay for and trying to prioritize. And so, I was trying to come up with constructs. I’m very conscious, as Yogi Berra said, you know, “In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.” And, the same thing is [true] with the two-war theory.

Strategically, it makes sense. I have very, very great friends who have written on behalf of this in various think tanks and people with great government experience. They’re very smart. They’re for that, but they’re also for a grand strategy that is different than what this administration is pursuing. We’re not pursuing global dominance, hegemony. We’re not underwriting an international rule-based order anymore. So, that’s where I [sense] that it’s obsolete. But in theory, it’s useful.

But what I was worried about was the advocacy of this particular construct, externally with Congress, is about trying to get a military that’s the military we want to have—large, robust, forward-deployed, deterring. It’s about the bureaucratic interest of the machine to want to have this robustness and risk reduction. But in the practice of it, what I find is we end up with a very conventional legacy-focused capability, and we buy what we have today, and the production lines are open on the Hill that the Congress wants to keep producing. And so, we’ll end up with tanks and rifles and airplanes and helicopters. We don’t invest in some of the things that either represent broader threats, new threats, [or] new domains that we need to be investing in.

And so, I think it expands the gap and increases the risk involved in both the first and the second conflict. I’ve called this the lose-lose strategy because I don’t think that Congress is going to give us 100 percent of the force structure for two wars, 100 percent of the recruiting money, the readiness money, and the equipment modernization money that you need. So, you end up with something like 80 percent of what you need for either of the two wars and, if you go to war, you could end up losing both of them.

And so, you know, that’s the difference between the theory and the practice. You know, we don’t get that kind of money, and we end up accepting readiness shortfalls. We ended up not investing in our people and MILCON [military construction]. We end up not investing in munitions inventories [and] all the things that are the places the service chiefs have to go to, to scrape up the resources to pay for a very large force structure. And we end up accepting—unconsciously—a lot of risk in areas that I thought were disadvantageous for the future.

Strategic deterrence and nuclear modernization’s a shortfall. Missile defense has been a shortfall, both national and theater. Capacity for protracted conflict with munitions we’ve seen since the Ukraine [invasion] were far shorter than we need. So, we’ve been accepting risk in all these buckets, unconsciously, with this desire to go out and fight and win foreign wars. And we’ve left the homeland, I think, a little bit open in the meantime, too. So, we’ve accepted a lot more risk with this construct than a reduction of risk. And, I wanted to spread that risk and make it more conscious, so, I proposed this mission-based kind of thing where you could put dollar amounts on this column, and then, at some point in time, you’re going to draw the red line. And that’s why I think we need to rethink that construct. It’s interesting to see how the administration has dealt with it. At least in the shell of the NDS, there’s a page on there that deals with this called the “simultaneity problem,” and they acknowledge that we can’t do both. And they basically told the allies, both in the Middle East, in South Korea, and in Europe, you’re kind of on your own for conventional deterrence. There’s some risk in that, particularly how you phase and time that.

But, we basically solved our problem by telling everybody else that some of these commitments and obligations we’ve had in the past are now up to them, which is going to be a hard thing to transition. And we’re probably accepting some risk. But I look over from my writing of 2017 and writing now, [and] that risk equation is a dynamic that changes every year. You know, 10 or even eight years ago, we could have talked about Russia in one way.

We, in the Pentagon, discussed Russia as sort of a near-term, reckless, declining power. I would have imagined that it would be less of a problem today. And it is—from its own actions, [for example regarding] the strategic suicide of what they’re doing in Ukraine, they basically expended their ground force and their armor capabilities. They haven’t expended their navy or their air force or certainly not their nukes. They’re still a great power in that sense but, I mean, there’s definitely a reduced risk on the second MTW [major theater war] if you were counting on Russia in a conventional mass sense. [There are] other threats in that region that’ll do all that. And Iran, with its, you know, trio of proxy forces, each of which has been heavily decremented of recent vintage. Iran is a less of [an] opportunist aggressor right now, too.

So, I’m more accepting of where the Pentagon has placed itself with the China situation and allies and partners, but we’re still obligated and still going to support them, and the strategy says that. The risk that we’re, I think, really absorbing in near- to mid-range right now from this decision in the 2026 Strategy is that the things that Europe would require of us, if it was doing its conventional fighting on its own—command and control, space, ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance], theater missile defense—those are all the high-value, low-density kinds of things that we’re trying to focus into the Pacific, as well.

So, there’s a demand on this that needs to be acknowledged and somehow massaged in some sense to balance off that risk. Right now, if we did end up in a dual situation, we’d be asking for the same assets to try to be in two different theaters simultaneously.

Echevarria

Back to your point about the mission-based focus, it was one of the things that I liked about your piece back in the summer. Of course, it’s still an issue—how much do you size for each of those missions? I think you laid out the right missions and so on. And, even if we aren’t in a major war, we’re seeing right now with the USS Abraham Lincoln having to have steamed its way like crazy to get in proximity to Iran in order to be able to do something there if needed, just after having Operation Midnight Hammer and Absolute Resolve in earlier months.

What advice, if any, can you offer for the sizing aspect of the prioritization? I think about right and shifting away from two-war to the mission-based construct, but I still worry about the sizing aspect of each of the forces dedicated to those particular missions.

Hoffman

I share a concern about size, but my concern is, as we expressed in the 2018 Strategy. The China problem, as we depicted it back then, was believed to be very, very significant in terms of capacity and force size. [It was] heavily naval and air force [focused], of course. There was such a shortfall there that the second MTW was improbable for execution with the resources we had. And, I don’t think that problem has been reduced. In fact, I’m more concerned about, you know, the first MTW than before.

China has done more than I anticipated between 2017 and today, and we have done less with a less sense of urgency and scale. So, I’m still more worried about the first MTW as a shortfall. The advantage on the mission-based thing is you get to break out some of the functional aspects to make sure that they don’t get subsumed in the ship count or tank count, you know, issues. So, you get to break out space, strategic deterrence. And I like what the administration’s done here, [which] is they’ve added the industrial base to deal with the protracted war problem and made that part of the strategy—kind of explicitly as opposed to a standalone strategy as we’ve done in the past. So, it’s much more integrated. You know, I'll give the administration some credit on that.

Host

What are some long-standing assumptions about Homeland Security, escalation, [and] strategic depth that we should probably let go going forward, and what would we replace them with?

Hoffman

We have a lot of assumptions in the American way of war, which I’ll characterize as, you know, we're all about expeditionary power projection. The American homeland is a sanctuary. We have uncontested exit from our ports of embarkation and debarkation, and we can transit, you know, transoceanic maneuver uncontested with our lines of communication sustained. All those assumptions in that version of the American way of war are pretty much invalid now, and we’re going to take casualties and losses, I think, in the American homeland. We’re going to find ports and airports struck in some way, whether it’s cyber or physical attacks or sabotage, particularly the Chinese infiltration into critical infrastructure. That’s really the biggest issue for me was the homeland. And it’s interesting to see how the administration has tucked that into their first line of effort, as I did. You know, it’s kind of rhetorical that we’re going to take care of America, but in the past, we were so strong—and the homeland was behind these two oceanic moats—that we could ignore threats to the homeland. It didn’t make the American taxpayer feel great that we were spending scarce dollars in either Asia or the Middle East and not taking care of the American people. So, rhetorically, we’ve always needed to say that defending America was our first priority, and the administration has done that, but they’ve tucked in the strategic deterrent into that, which I think is questionable.

Our strategic deterrent is also our extended deterrent with our allies in Europe and Asia. So, to me, it’s kind of a broader mission than the homeland. Of course, they’ve tied in the whole Western hemisphere, which I think thinking of the homeland in a broader sense to include Canada and Mexico and Latin America and the Panama Canal, makes sense organizationally, institutionally. So, I think that’s definitely a plus. Just because the homeland is the number one priority doesn’t mean it gets more money than LOE [line of effort] number 2 with China. It just means that we’re going to resolve those risks in that line of effort with sufficient funding, I believe.

And then, you know, to me, LOE 2 in China is the larger problem that’s going to get the larger amount of resources. It’s also where I think we’re, right now, consciously accepting quite a bit of risk. Until we get our technologies and our advanced systems online, we’re facing an opponent that has three times our mass, three times our people and, right now, about a 100 times our shipbuilding capacity. I don’t know where we are on missile production comparatives, but since they’re the world’s largest manufacturer, I don’t think they’ll have a lot of shortfalls right now. They’re very competitive with us on advanced technology, particularly in the emerging technologies in quantum, hypersonic, and AI [artificial intelligence]. Most people are now saying either months behind us or a month ahead of us. So, there's a lot of prioritization there.

Before, we could always assume technological supremacy, and we used to assume blindly that the American arsenal of democracy was behind us. And, those assumptions are definitely outdated.

Echevarria

Yeah, I would say the same thing. The assumptions are kind of everything. And when you’re doing strategy, or we’re trying to execute it, if assumptions are wrong and you can’t adapt to the new reality—I mean, look at the Russian attack across the Ukraine border in February of 2022 [there were] some really poor assumptions on part of the Russians, and they were really unable to adapt and to adjust to the new reality that confronted them on the ground.

You have to make assumptions. I don’t want to move forward with strategy or planning or any of it, but I hope that we will retain the flexibility of option B, whatever option B might be, if the initial assumptions turn out to be flawed for whatever reason.

Hoffman

It’s wonderful. I think it’s in the Lippmann Gap. You know, there’s a desire to sometimes measure with a micrometer and think that you can measure everything, but you also need a little bit of extra capacity to deal with the unexpected.

It’s prudent, and I’m a Colin Gray devotee [regarding] prudence and adaptability—prudence about risk and adapting to the unexpected—the two cardinal virtues of force planners. And, if we get overcommitted and underfunded, it’s not very prudent. And then you’re relying an awful lot on adaptability. The Ukrainians and the Russians are in a contest for adaptability right now. And it’s fascinating to watch their two systems, their two industrial ecosystems, try to outcompete each other in new ways that they, in 2022, had never imagined.

Host

If each of you had to advise the Secretary of War today, where would you recommend accepting risk? And where must the nation not accept risk under any circumstances?

Echevarria

I’ll turn the question around a little bit and say that we need to be focused on increasing the risk to our adversaries rather than defensively looking at where we should minimize or accept our own risk. I think that [for] our strategy moving forward, I would like to see [us] get directly at the risks to autocratic regimes and so on.

We tend to assume, getting back to assumptions, that costs [are important]. Eventually, our adversaries get tired of paying various costs for whatever the endeavor is and so on. But, I think that we can get to that point faster if we ensure that the costs we are imposing speak directly to the risks that those regimes [face]—usually about regime security, stability, and all of that—as opposed to how many soldiers are losing in the field or on the seas, in the air, what have you.

So, I think that’s what my first line of effort in terms of advice would be with regard to risk. So, I would look at that.

Anyway, over to you, Frank.

Hoffman

Yeah, well, I took the question as given, having been in this particular question. I’ve had to answer this question [while] tap dancing in front of a big desk on the third floor [of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building].

Again, consistent with my article, and because of Iran’s proxy decline and Russia’s strategic suicide, I’d accept more risk on the second MTW as the strategy does. But I’m cautioned by my concern about the dual-use or high-density items, low-density, high-value items that Europe is going to count on. That’s a concern. Another area I’d probably take a little more risk [on is the Golden Dome]—I like how it’s been qualified in the NDS. A Golden Dome could be a huge sump hole for at least $1 trillion. There’s estimates that go much higher. The $1.1 trillion is actually, I think, the middle mark.

The Strategy calls for cost-effective missile defense. You could spend the entire Pentagon budget and still have huge swaths of the United States uncovered, particularly from cruise missiles, but also ballistic missile defense. [It would be] very expensive. Opportunity costs are high for the other things that we need to do. So, I like the way they’re pursuing cost-effective defense, I think, as a risk minimization issue that hopefully that’ll be prioritized.

The things where I’d not accept risk right now, as I wrote in my article, I think space is a war-fighting domain that’s underinvested. It’s not something where things pass through like information. I think we’re going to maneuver platforms, maybe even people and, certainly, strike options and defense options in space that we’re not prepared for. Theater missile defense and integrated air defense is a shortfall that we need less risk. Secure C2 [command and control] is definitely an area where we need less risk, given the threats.

Strategically though, looking for a counterintuitive answer, I would take less risk in our relationships with allies. You know, we need allies strategically, not just because of values or democracy but also for access, for trade, for standards and trades, and for standing up to China.

Echevarria

If we’re on the right course with our allies, one way to help distribute costs—and to make burden sharing more effective—is to have meaningful allies, [a] clear understanding of what we need from them, and what we’re willing to provide to them.

So, absolutely.

Host

Thank you both.

Listeners, you can read the genesis article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 55, issue 2. For more Army War College podcasts, check out Conversations on Strategy, SSI Live, CLSC Dialogues, and A Better Peace.