National Security Task Force

The Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security: A fresh look, through a broad lens, to help navigate the emerging security landscape.

In this century, the United States faces a significantly different threat landscape than it did in the last. Strategies for meeting the national security challenges we face today need to address the many attributes of national power. Military strength is necessary, but no longer sufficient. Effectively addressing many of our national security problems will require cooperation with allies and partners, and recognition of the importance of diplomacy, economic strength, science and technology, and demographics. The Hoover Institution’s Task Force on National Security pursues such a comprehensive, whole of government approach to national security challenges.

The Hoover Institution houses under its roofs some of the world’s most eminent national security thinkers and practitioners, committed to developing and articulating new strategies to cope with this increasingly chaotic world. The National Security Task Force combines military expertise with the Fellowship’s equal depth in economics, in diplomacy, in geopolitics, and political thought—as well as the historical experiences documented in the collections of the Hoover Library and Archives. And the Task Force furthermore draws on both the global policy and science and technology leadership of Stanford University more broadly, and the surrounding Silicon Valley, in looking over the horizon to understand the dynamics of the emerging threat landscape—a “West Coast offense” for a new century of security challenges.

As an important first step, Task Force participants convene roundtable discussions where current national security decisionmakers—military and civilian—can air their own priorities, interests, and concerns and explore these new dynamics through frank engagement with Hoover Fellows, Stanford scholars and students, or others with experience and expertise in the field. Our goal is to offer a fresh look: allow those striving to meet the nation’s security needs to set out an agenda that is relevant to them, and inform and influence national security policy and strategy that through the scholarship of this Institution and University, supporting those who grapple daily with the weight of preserving national security in a complex, emerging new world.