Affording Defense

In this edited volume, Mackenzie Eaglen brings together top foreign and defense policy voices in Washington to address the ever-growing resource-strategic mismatch evident in US defense policy. This project is designed to provide the administration with immediate and realistic solutions to bolster America’s military and restore its flagging strategic and conventional deterrents.

Kyle Balzer is a Jeane Kirkpatrick Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on great-power competition, US grand strategy, long-term strategic competition, US nuclear strategy and policy, and arms control. He specializes in Cold War nuclear strategy and the evolution of American deterrence theory.

Dan Blumenthal is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of The China Nightmare: The Grand Ambitions of a Decaying State (2020).

Hal Brands is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies US foreign policy and defense strategy. Concurrently, he is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is also a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.

James C. Capretta is a senior fellow and holds the Milton Friedman Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies health care, entitlement programs, and fiscal trends in advanced economies.

Zack Cooper is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies US defense strategy and allies in Asia. He also teaches at Princeton University and is the author of Tides of Fortune: The Rise and Decline of Great Militaries (2025).