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sitrep: aspen security Forum By Evan Anderson ________ Why Read: Last week's annual Aspen Security Forum featured top leaders from the US government, but no current Defense officials. Read more to find out why, and what the highlights and low points were from on the ground. ________ At the top of the mountain, we are all snow leopards. - Hunter S. Thompson
Each summer in Aspen, Colorado, global leaders in government and private industry meet on the campus of the Aspen Institute to discuss top security challenges. For decades, the Aspen Security Forum has offered a public / private interface with top leadership in policy and defense that promotes honest conversations about what must be done to properly address such challenges. Regular SNS readers will recall that when we stood up INVNT/IP, one of our earliest moves was to produce a description of the scope and scale of Chinese government IP theft programs and bring that material to Aspen to deliver it to intelligence and government professionals working to stop the bleeding. It worked. For this reason, the Forum has long been a must-attend for anyone working on issues relating to national defense from the private sector. For those in the US government, it provides a bipartisan respite from the halls of DC wherein semi-honest perspectives can be shared publicly and truly honest ones shared off the record. The thing about being relatively honest and open when it comes to security is that it is an activity reserved for nations with effective militaries. In authoritarian, fear-based systems, the military is as political a tool as anything else. To please political leadership and protect themselves, military brass in such systems sweep problems under the rug. The result of trading professionalism for politics in a nation's military, unsurprisingly, is unmitigated incompetence. This is currently on full display by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps across the Middle East and the ongoing failure of the Russian military to produce anything beyond blood-soaked chaos and unsustainable losses in Eastern Ukraine. The US and its key allies have long led the world in effective military force projection. NATO and other allies are regularly in attendance at Aspen, offering unique and often frontline perspectives that help to reduce the distance between the broader world and the mountaintop retreat in which attendees find themselves. Critically, the event has made a pointed effort throughout its history to be apolitical. This year's Forum was defined by three key themes: the emergence of a completely novel combat technology and geopolitical paradigm; the difficulties that the traditional DC policy set has in understanding and addressing that shift; and the politicization by the current US administration of the American defense world. So, la Lewis Carroll, let's begin at the beginning, and go on till we come to the end.
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