“Are we serious, or are we not? I know what America, when it’s serious, looks like. That’s the America that got ready to win the Cold War in the early 1950s. Are we serious, or are we not?”
[…]
“We’ve got to prioritize. Do we care about winning, or do we care about being nice? Do we care about being fair? Do we care about checking every box and making everybody happy and playing by the rules? I think the time for that has gone.
We’ve spent the better part of a generation optimizing for the wrong set of virtues—or rather, a different set of virtues than the ones now required, which is national seriousness to win.
Unless and until we embrace that mentality, and unless and until we have that sort of fatalistic imagination to believe that, if we don’t, we will fall behind—and fall behind real fast—then nothing else matters. Everything flows from that.”
— Christian Brose · CNA, Reimagining Defense Strategy (2021)
