Patrick Cronin is a Senior Advisor and Senior Director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the
Center for a New American Security (CNAS). Previously, he was the Director of the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) at National Defense University and has had a 25-year career inside government and academic research centers, spanning defense affairs, foreign policy, and development assistance.
Dr. Cronin served more than two years at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), where he was the Director of Studies, Editor of the Adelphi Papers, and Executive Director of the Armed Conflict Database. Prior to joining IISS, Dr. Cronin was Director of Research and Senior Vice President at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.
In 2001, he was confirmed by the Senate to the third-ranking position at the U.S. Agency for International Development. While serving as Assistant Administrator for Policy and Program Coordination, Dr. Cronin led agency, interagency, and international policy deliberations, as well as the interagency task force that helped design the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). From 1998 until 2001, Dr. Cronin served as Director of Research at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
Dr. Cronin spent seven years at the National Defense University, arriving at INSS in 1990 as a Senior Research Professor covering Asian and long-range security issues. He was the founding Executive Editor of Joint Force Quarterly, and subsequently became both Deputy Director and Director of Research at the Institute. He received the Army's Meritorious Civilian Service Award upon his departure from NDU in 1997. He has also been a senior analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses, a
U.S. Naval Reserve Intelligence officer, and an analyst with the Congressional Research Service and SRI International. He was Associate Editor of Strategic Review and worked as an undergraduate at the Miami Herald and the Fort Lauderdale News.
Dr. Cronin has taught at several universities. He was an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program, The Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and the University of Virginia’s Woodrow Wilson Department of Government.
He read International Relations at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, where he received both his M.Phil. and D.Phil. degrees, and graduated with high honors from the University of Florida. His publications include: Global Strategic Assessment, 2009: America’s Security Role in a Changing World (NDU Press 2009); Civilian Surge: Key to Complex Operations (co-editor with Hans Binnendijk, NDU Press 2009); The Impenetrable Fog of War: Reflections on Modern Warfare and Strategic Surprise (Praeger 2008); The Evolution of Strategic Thought: Adelphi Paper Classics (Routledge 2008); and Double Trouble: Iran and North Korea as Challenges to International Security (Praeger 2007).
The Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) has become a major employer in Virginia, and no one should be insensitive to job insecurity, especially in the current recession. Nonetheless, the Command—even under the venerable leadership of General James Mattis—never matched its initial promise to bring joint doctrine and joint force innovation and readiness to the U.S. Armed Forces. These requirements will once again have to be folded into other parts of the bureaucracy, whether that is the Joint Staff or Combatant Commands. If closing JFCOM can save enough money to halt the precipitous decline in American Naval power (and allow the Navy to head back up at least in the direction of the 313 ships judged to be needed to keep pace, for instance, with a rising China’s anti-access strategy and increasing assertiveness in the South China Sea), then it will have been a laudable tradeoff indeed.
Having written earlier this year on the need for ‘restraint’ to help bring growing U.S. commitments in line with our constricted means, I want to emphasize that it was never my intention to detract from American leadership. Instead, I simply want to help continuously underscore the economic foundations of our security and highlight the need for other allies and partners to contribute to the global collective good of security, broadly defined.
In the short term, the United States is likely to continue to seek to do more with less. But unless we find a way to invest in our people, our infrastructure, our innovation, our education, and our attractiveness as an economic and political model, all while using our hard power softly, we will have no alternative but to do less with less.
Secretary Gates has done about as much as one member of Cabinet can do to help steer the world’s largest defense budget in a more sustainable direction for protecting American interests. In doing so he has eschewed financial trickery for common sense. Common sense is worth a great deal in a century when information floods our lives. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, common sense is really “genius dressed in working clothes.” Those clothes are worn by Robert Gates.
Dr. Patrick M. Cronin is Senior Advisor at the nonpartisan Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C. He is the author of the recent CNAS report, “Restraint: Recalibrating American Strategy.”
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