Obama’s Hawk: The Weird, Dangerous World of Robert Work

Peter Navarro

Security,

What we know about Robert Work is that he is seeking a Third Offset Strategy to address the emerging threats. 

Mine-hunting mini-subs, unmanned swarms, and human-machine “centaurs.” These are the weird and dangerous “advanced capabilities” Robert Work is intent on developing to defend America in an age of the rapid obsolescence of weapons systems.

While a “lead from behind” Barack Obama has generally received low marks as commander-in-chief—from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria to “Honey, I shrunk the naval fleet”—the president certainly can’t be faulted for appointing Robert Work as his Deputy Secretary of Defense. Work is second in command at the Pentagon, “Chief Operating Officer” of one of the world’s largest and most complex bureaucracies, and a “soldier’s soldier,” with twenty-seven years in the marines before retirement.

Cut from similar cloth as the legendary Andy Marshall, Work’s special gift is an unusual command of the emerging battlefield in an age of rapid technological change. Work’s Holy Grail as he grapples with a severely constrained military budget is finding an effective “Third Offset Strategy” capable of staying at least two steps ahead of the five major enemies Work identifies on his four-dimensional chessboard: China, Iran, North Korea, Russia and the trans-national threat of ISIS.

The concept of an “offset strategy” is just the opposite of Stalin’s famous admonition that “quantity has a quality all its own.” The strategic counter-idea is to “offset” some numerical advantage of the enemy in a technologically elegant way.