International Security Studies presents Elbridge (“Bridge”) Colby, co-founder and principal of The Marathon Initiative:
“American Strategy for the Decisive Decade.”
How can the United States develop and implement strategies to prepare for an era of sustained great power competition with China? Elbridge (“Bridge”) Colby, co-founder and principal of The Marathon Initiative has thought deeply about these challenges as both a scholar and national security practitioner.
Colby is the author of The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict (Yale University Press, 2021), which The Wall Street Journal selected as one of the top ten books of 2021. Earlier in his career, Colby served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development. In that role, he served as the lead official in the development and rollout of the Department’s preeminent strategic planning guidance, the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS). The 2018 NDS is noteworthy for shifting the Department of Defense’s focus away from counterterrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq and towards the challenges to U.S. security interests posed by China and by Russia—a bipartisan policy that continues today.
Colby has also worked as the Director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security and as a senior fellow at the Center for Naval Analyses. Over the course of his career, he has also served in a variety of U.S. Government roles working on strategic forces, arms control, and intelligence reform matters. Colby publishes widely both in the United States and abroad. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School.