On this week's episode of Security Dilemma, John Allen Gay and A.J. Manuzzi spoke with Dan Caldwell and Jennifer Kavanagh about their recent Defense Priorities explainer on U.S. defense posture under a grand strategy of restraint.

Dan Caldwell is a former senior adviser to the Secretary of Defense and worked on the Trump 2024 transition team. He is a veteran of the Marines and a former Capitol Hill staffer. Jennifer is a senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities. She previously was a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment and a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, where she directed RAND’s Army Strategy program for three years. Kavanagh’s research focuses on U.S. military strategy, force structure and defense budgeting, the defense industrial base, and U.S. military interventions.

In this conversation, we discussed how the United States can realign its defense posture with realist core national interests and objectives, and what obstacles such a realignment would face. You can read their full paper here: https://www.defensepriorities.org/explainers/aligning-global-military-posture-with-us-interests/.