Defense Secretary Ash Carter, Deputy Secretary Bob Work, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Paul Selva and other Department of Defense officials will appear on Oct. 28 during a day-long conference examining the Third Offset Strategy.
“Assessing the Third Offset Strategy: Progress and Prospects for Defense Innovation,” sponsored by the Department of Defense and hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, will include a keynote address by Secretary Carter and a panel discussion featuring Deputy Secretary Work and Gen. Selva. Other DoD officials participating include Under Secretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Frank Kendall; Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency Director Arati Parbhakar; and Raj Shah, managing director of the Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental, or DIUx.
The Third Offset Strategy is a Department of Defense Initiative to harness new technologies and organizational and operational constructs to offset the numerical or other advantages of potential adversaries. The concept borrows from previous U.S. offset strategies during the Cold War, which employed, first, U.S. nuclear superiority, and later, U.S. conventional advantages such as precision weapons and advanced battle networks, to offset the Soviet Union’s numerical advantages.
Leading the initiative for the department, Deputy Secretary Work has focused on technologies such as autonomy, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and concepts such as human-machine collaborative networks.
Members of the media wishing to register for the event should contact CSIS at 202-775-3242. A detailed agenda for the conference is available at https://www.csis.org/events/assessing-third-offset-strategy.