The third offset may already be here.

• Author: McKinley, Craig R.
• Position: President's Perspective

In the April edition of National Defense, I wrote about the third offset strategy being pursued by the Pentagon. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel kicked off this effort in November 2014, and Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work provided greater elaboration in early 2015.

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The focus of my comments last month were that in seeking the emergence of the third offset from both traditional defense companies and those being approached by the Defense Department in non-traditional places, such as Silicon Valley, the Pentagon needed to carefully consider its existing policies on guiding and expensing independent research and development, and to have realistic expectations of the Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental office opened up in Silicon Valley.

At the moment, the strategy remains more a third offset aspiration, as the developments that will make it real--and result in its reflection somewhere in the defense budget and program-are still in the formative stages. Nonetheless, a presentation I recently attended reminded me of the value of attempting to stimulate such an effort.

This presentation from the Defense Department's policy shop contained a quote from Guilio Douhet, the 1920s Italian air power theorist, and one of the early advocates of strategic bombing--what we would call today "long-range strike"-that stated, "victory smiles upon those who anticipate changes in the character of war, not upon those who wait to adapt themselves after the changes occur." The briefing also reminded those in attendance that, "the future unveils itself slowly," and that the "most substantive changes may not be the most obvious."

Douhet's observation fits nicely with one made later by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger regarding strategic concepts for the employment of nuclear weapons. As Kissinger noted, "the battlefield is a poor place for improvisation." Kissinger's thought, although later directed toward effectively utilizing what Work defined as the second offset, suggests the timelessness of Douhet's quote, and explains why the Defense Department is thinking about it nearly 100 years later.

It is worth giving further thought to the second observation, that major changes may not be the most obvious. An example would be GPS. In fact, GPS may well have been the "third offset" and we are now looking for the fourth. As originally conceived, the system was merely going to provide a globally available system for precise location of aircraft...