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Military Analysis Program

A sustainable military strategy and force structure to protect U.S. security interests

The Military Analysis Program develops U.S. military force structure, posture, and budget recommendations that operationalize a grand strategy of restraint. It seeks to identify a set of military strategies and decisions about force size, organization, and capabilities that sustainably defends core U.S. interests and avoids military overstretch and entanglement in unnecessary conflicts.

Jennifer Kavanagh

Military analysis, Alliances, Asia, Combat planning and operations, Counterterrorism, Defense budgeting, Defense industrial base, Deterrence, Foreign and defense policy, Grand strategy, Great power competition, Israel-Iran, Middle East, NATO, and Ukraine-Russia

Senior Fellow & Director of Military Analysis

Jennifer Kavanagh is a senior fellow & director of military analysis at Defense Priorities.

A political scientist by training, Kavanagh has spent her career studying U.S. national security and defense policy. Kavanagh’s research focuses on U.S. military strategy, force structure and defense budgeting, the defense industrial base, and U.S. military deployments and interventions.

Previously, Kavanagh was a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She also worked as a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, where she led projects for defense and national security clients. She served for three years as director of RAND’s Army Strategy program. Her work has been published in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Journal of Conflict Resolution, The Washington Quarterly, Lawfare, Los Angeles Times, and War on the Rocks, among other outlets.

Senior Fellow

Defense Priorities

Program overview

The Military Analysis Program develops U.S. military force structure, posture, and budget recommendations that operationalize a grand strategy of restraint.

While hard power and advanced military capabilities are essential to the safeguarding of U.S. vital interests, military force should be used sparingly and primarily in support of two core strategic objectives: protecting the physical and economic security of the United States and preventing the rise of a regional hegemon on the Eurasian landmass.

The program seeks to identify a set of U.S. military strategies, force structures (capabilities and organization), and posture decisions that can sustainably achieve these two goals. It does this while striving to reduce the risk of U.S. military overstretch, avoid entanglement in unnecessary conflicts, and minimize the potential for escalation, especially with our primary competitor China, and other challengers, like Russia and Iran.

The program combines several lines of effort to work toward its vision of a U.S. military force structure that operates within resource constraints and is better calibrated—in terms of number of forces and mix of capabilities and unit types—for today’s contested international security environment. This vision relies less on U.S. forward military presence and more on burden shifting to allies and partners, with U.S. forces acting primarily in defensive, support, and limited expeditionary roles.

Major areas of research

Evaluation of U.S. and adversary military capabilities to assess relevant advantages, disadvantages, gaps, and opportunities.
Assessment of allied capabilities to identify opportunities and requirements for burden shifting.
Campaign analysis of potential military contingencies (e.g., Chinese invasion of Taiwan, war in South China Sea, war with Iran, defense of the Baltics) to examine force structure and munition requirements.
Wargames, crisis simulations, and “red teaming” activities to compare advantages and disadvantages of restraint-oriented strategies and alternatives such as primacy or deep engagement.
Analysis of DoD strategy documents and especially budgets to improve prioritization and identify areas of overspending and underinvestment.
Investigation of U.S. defense industrial base requirements, shortcomings, and inefficiencies.
Review of current U.S. military posture and overseas basing infrastructure to identify opportunities for reducing redundancy and improving resilience.