Frank A. Rose has spent three decades at the centre of American nuclear and arms control policy — as Principal Deputy Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration and, before that, as Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Verification and Compliance.
We begin where most conversations about defence stop: procurement. The United States designed, built and fielded the Polaris system (submarine-based nuclear missiles) in five years. Today, Rose argues, there is no major weapons system that could be delivered on that timeline — not for want of engineering, but because a system built in the late 1960s for oversight and cost control was never built for speed.
From there the conversation widens. Why did bureaucratic overhead keep growing through two decades of war? What did the 1993 "Last Supper" cost the American defence industrial base, and why can lost tooling and lost people not be bought back? Rose makes the case for mass over exquisiteness, and for treating startups and venture capital as a core acquisition pathway rather than a side channel.
On world order, Rose expects historians to describe the post-1989 decades not as a new order but as a deviation from the normal — a holiday from history. He revisits Gideon Rachman's argument about the two 1989s, sets out why he does not accept NATO enlargement as the root of the rupture with Moscow, and calls the 2008 Bucharest compromise on Ukraine the worst of both worlds.
And on Europe: the talent is there, the technology is there. What is missing is the market structure to deploy it.
Further Reading:
https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/2025/08/04/technology-not-geography-will-grant-global-power-in-the-21st-century/
https://www.realcleardefense.com/2025/12/10/the_revenge_of_nuclear_deterrence_1152430.html
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-america-still-needs-lead-europe-frank-rose-x9une/
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2025/09/how-trump-can-make-defense-reform-stick/408383/
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