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I was inspired by @C_M_Dougherty recent piece to re-open the Agenda SecDef series that Shawn Brimley started with me in 2015. A couple stories on this: https://warontherocks.com/category/special-series/agenda-secdef/page/2/
First, @EvansRyan202 was super generous to let us just pitch a series where we were making it up as we were going along--particularly in 2017 when we rescoped it to focus on advice for Mattis (which he read!).
Second, Shawn Brimley was smart about this series in a few ways. He knew that I was really nervous about publishing anything at all, having just left government. He used this series as a way to get me out of my shell with issues I knew inside out, and cajoled me through drafts.
But more than that, he made us interrogate our own assumptions. We'd worked these issues originally as junior AOs and had a seriously limited perspective sometimes. We HAD to make ourselves consider different lenses, not always perfectly, to speak credibly.
Anyway, I miss Shawn. It'd be so fun to text with him about all the new things coming out of DOD.
