The Operators Part 4 mapped the Think Tankers as operators of agenda supply—narrative, network, venue—who flood the field with frames that policy shops and committees can cite without adopting liability.

Addendum 4a isolated the Framers and Shapers—template builders who turn elastic ideas into legible kits that committees, agencies, and editors can lift into their own artefacts with minimal friction.

Addendum 4b identifies the Engineers—people who take those kits and tool them into metrics, scenarios, clauses, installs, so that what looked like persuasion becomes procedure.

The chain is the point—metrics summarise the world in numbers, scenarios bind those numbers to futures, clauses compress futures into governing text, installs make the text the default in budgets, directives, and standards. Think Tankers are present across all four links—4b flags the specific hands who cut the dovetails that let one link seat in the next without rework.

Read this section as a translation manual—how frame becomes form factor and how form factor becomes lawlike behaviour inside bureaucratic calendars.

Case Study Index:

1. Julian Corbett — RUSI-adjacent
2. Andrew Marshall (Net Assessment) — RAND/OSD
3. Mark & Matthew Cancian — CSIS / Naval War College
4. Kagan–Nuland Set — Brookings/AEI/ISW ↔ State
5. Seth G. Jones — RAND Afghanistan/force-structure budgeteer
6. Philip Zelikow — Miller Center/Hoover ↔ Commission/State

1. Julian Corbett — RUSI-adjacent

Long before “jointness” turned into managerial cliché—Corbett showed how to code naval strategy as examinable method, moving language from lecture hall into Staff College frames and Admiralty guidance.

• Ribbon: Strategic Theory → Staff College Curriculum → Maritime Guidance → Fleet Programs
• Lane / Era: Maritime professionalisation & naval-legal legitimation | Peak influence 1900s–1910s
• House(s): Royal United Service Institution milieu, Royal Naval War College, Naval Staff colleges
• Role Type: Shaper

Imprint: The Operating Code

Corbett operated as a curriculum engineer rather than a pamphleteer—the point was to translate “command of communications” into planning verbs that constructors and budgeteers could not ignore. Campaign history supplied the grammar, Staff College ritual supplied the calendar.

A trade-dependent empire needed officers who could justify force structure as procedure rather than creed—without shared tables, ROE skeletons and corridor metrics the Navy risked doctrinal theatre and procurement drift. His method was to fix a staff language in the schools, then let that phrasing flow into Admiralty notes and programme guidance—the selectors were Naval Staff tutors, Plans directors and service editors who wanted predictable convoy protection and expedition support.

Banner & Rite: The Stage and Its Scripts

The Staff College and Royal Naval War College rooms—part seminar, part map board, part exam hall—functioned as rehearsal stages that doubled as clearing houses. RUSI’s Journal and lectures provided the broader intellectual ecosystem and syndication channel that gave his work legitimacy before it was codified in the curriculum.

Rites (the tools):

• Named lecture blocks that bound “serious” doctrine to examinable schemata—see the War College’s printed publications series (e.g.,Corbett’s Notes on Strategy, 1909) for the lecture-to-pamphlet pipeline.
• Précis and solution papers that froze phrasing for reuse in guidance—preserved in course notes, strategical exercises and précis of lectures for officer instruction.
• Problem-books that turned thesis into corridor matrices and escort ratios—the War College pamphlet lists show institutionalised problem-sets built for graded use.

The masterstroke was curricular capture—once capstone problems required Corbett’s constructs, the same tables appeared in Admiralty War Staff planning notes that procurement shops treated as cite-safe (wording packaged to be quoted in official work with minimal legal or procedural risk) via the Confidential / Reference Book (CB/BR) series. The room mixed instructors, Plans officers, Trade Division staff and constructors—the same personnel who wrote routing orders and built estimates—so consensus arrived as pre-formatted policy.

The Kit: Pre-Formatted Components

Corbett’s essential product was a learned-lawful operating system for sea control—a disciplined lexicon that recast strategic choices as professional compliance. Core verbs—”protect,” “route,” “concentrate,” “sustain”—powered pre-formatted templates: “sea-control bands” dictating patrol tempos, “communications corridors” with escort ratios, and “limited-war ROE” calibrated to apply pressure without escalation. Additional templates specified force-concentration sequencing, amphibious timetables, and trade-protection tables mapping threat bands to escort classes and surge capacity (see “British Way of War“, Corbett’s works catalogue and Navy Records Society materials).

This toolkit enforced a direct chain from metrics → scenarios → clauses → installs. It began with quantifiable inputs—tonnage at risk, escort-days, sortie rates—tested against scenarios like corridor denial or colonial reinforcement. The output was clause-ready directives—”maintain X escort-days per corridor per month,” “hold Y percent of cruisers at 96-hour readiness”—built to surface in Admiralty Staff notes and Fleet Routing Instructions issued as CB/BR directives. Once embedded, constructors and budgeteers built directly to the clauses (text engineered to drop straight into governing documents—orders, strategies, budget justifications—without redrafting), installing the strategy as physical and financial fact without relitigating its premises.

Distribution: The Logistics of Inevitability

Rollout followed the institutional clock—Term Lecture → Précis → Exam Frame → Admiralty Planning Note → Programme Guidance.

Corbett’s doctrines moved on a timed assembly line: a War College lecture entered the course-note and précis stream, shaped exam problems via the pamphlet/problem-book series, then migrated into Admiralty War Staff guidance and binding CB/BR books—such as CB 415, “War Instructions for British Merchant Ships” (Aug 1917), which operationalised routing and protection rules. The escort mathematics was explicit in the Admiralty memorandum of 1 May 1917 stating destroyer and escort requirements for Atlantic convoys. Budget closure is visible in the UK Navy Estimates debate of 6 March 1918, where votes for destroyers, sloops, patrol craft and support tonnage are justified by the convoy system and trade-protection requirements—analysis lines echoed by Navy Records Society retrospectives.

Syndication → Binding: service press and college proceedings disseminated the lexicon; Routing Instructions and Trade Division circulars lifted seminar verbs into standing orders via the CB/BR system—a translation that often completed inside a single quarter.

Placement & Binding: The Human Circuit

The human circuit bound the method—people moved the phrasing, not committees. War College instructors rotated into Plans and Trade Division, carrying exam rubrics and problem-book matrices into Staff drafts.

Carriers → handoffs:

• Senior Tutor (Ops) → Plans: turns exam frames into paragraph models for planning notes and war orders
• Trade Division officer → Fleet Orders staff: lifts escort ratios and rendezvous cadence into routing instructions
• Lecturer (logistics) → Controller & Third Sea Lord: recodes readiness gates and refit calendars as programme guidance.

Lock points:

• CB/BR editors freeze Staff wording—ships treat it as standing order
• DNC and Controller transcribe minima into bids—budget text inherits Staff verbs
• Treasury examiners see one vocabulary—arguments collapse to numbers inside that frame.

Cadence held by rotation timing—the tutors shift into drafting roles before guidance windows, then back to schools with freshly approved language. Output is linguistic continuity—exam → note → order → estimate reads in one voice, so constructors and budgeteers treat escort counts, patrol tempos and readiness thresholds as givens.

Synthesis: The Runtime Function

Corbett’s legacy is a staff language that made maritime strategy examinable and installable—an operating code that outlived its author by embedding itself in curricula, planning notes and budget logic.

• Input: lectures, précis, problem-book tables
• Output: routing orders, planning notes, guidance that read like neutral method

Power sits in the method—language standardised, personnel interlocked, timing disciplined—so the same paragraph can move from lectern to order book with minimal edit.

2. Andrew Marshall (Net Assessment) —RAND/OSD

• Ribbon: Competitive Scenarios → Net Assessments → Strategy Tasks → Budget Signals
• Lane / Era: Strategic-competitive engineering & offsets (i.e., leveraging technological superiority to counter numerical advantages) | Peak influence 1973–2015
• House(s): RAND → Office of Net Assessment (OSD/SECDEF)
• Role Type: Engineer

Imprint: The Operating Code

Andrew Marshall’s core innovation was a systematic method for analysing long-term military competitions. As the founder and long-time director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (1973-2015), his goal was to translate abstract rivalries, like the Cold War, into concrete, actionable tasks and budget priorities that the individual military branches had to address. Across four decades, he shaped how senior leaders framed rivalry—an influence publicly marked when in March 2019 the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) announced his passing and role as ONA’s founder.

The office’s chartered function—long-range, comparative assessments to inform the Secretary—sits in DoDD 5111.11. His method solved a basic bureaucratic problem: each service, like the Army or Navy, naturally advocates for its own priorities using its own metrics. Marshall’s “net assessment” imposed a single, comparative framework, forcing everyone to analyse competitions the same way over the long term. This meant that when a new strategy was finally drafted, its conclusions were already framed in a way that directly shaped funding and program decisions.

Banner & Rite: The Stage and Its Scripts

The ritual was tight—commission the inquiry, convene the game, issue the memo. RAND alumni and service futurists executed studies while ONA ran the calendar. Scenario books fixed geometry (time–distance, salvo math, logistics arcs, force-generation gates); competitive scorecards collapsed asymmetries into deltas a deputy could read; wargame injects forced design choices on sensing, magazines and survivability. The task-indirection was the stroke—memos seeded strategy lines in the National Defense Strategy, which services then had to answer in concepts and, next, in the Program Objective Memorandum. The Third-Offset speeches by DEPSECDEF Robert Work show the pattern: scenario logic → strategic tasks → procurement-relevant signals.

The Kit: Pre-Formatted Components

Marshall’s kit made comparative logic installable as requirements. Time–distance ladders became closure times and tanker arcs; salvo balance sheets translated platforms and loads into raid size and defence depth; kill-chain latency maps reduced detect-to-engage to minute-level timing; learning-curve tables put price slopes under units; magazine and sortie gates expressed endurance as days of fire and reload cycles; dispersal checklists turned basing resilience into ramp slots and fuel bladders; counter-A2/AD playcards summarised range overmatch and sensor reach; risk footers named what fails first. The literature around Marshall’s method (see “The Last Warrior” and reviews) records this comparative grammar and its diffusion into strategy shops.

Chain Enforcement — metrics → scenarios → clauses → installs

The chain began with measurable inventory and performance (missile counts, sortie generation, attrition thresholds, unit-cost slopes, replenishment time), ran those numbers through archipelagic-denial or first-island-chain crises, and produced clause-sized sentences that sounded like prudence rather than direction—field ≥X days of preferred-range munitions, achieve Y-minute detect-to-engage in sector k, maintain Z distributed operating locations ready inside N days.

Once these clauses surfaced as NDS task lines, they reappeared as guidance to programmers and then as POM issue papers. The 2022 NDS release illustrates how such task lines become the reference grammar for programming and resourcing:

[Metrics] “Russia remains the U.S. rival with the most capable and diverse nuclear forces… enabling employment ranging from large-scale attacks… to limited strikes in support of a regional campaign.”
[Scenarios] “To deter large-scale attacks… and to deter theater attacks and nuclear coercion of Allies and partners…”
[Clauses] “…we will field a modern, resilient nuclear Triad and we will bolster the Triad…”
[Installs] “…with F-35A dual-capable aircraft equipped with the B61-12, the W76-2 warhead, and the Long-Range Standoff weapon…”
[Effect] “…ensuring that Russia’s leadership does not miscalculate… thereby reducing their confidence in initiating conventional war against NATO or employing non-strategic nuclear weapons.” (Source: NDS, 2022 Nuclear Posture Review, p11).

Distribution: The Logistics of Inevitability

A typical year moved in quarters—an ONA commission landed with a scenario deck and prelim metrics; a wargame and red-team produced deltas and performance gates; a two-pager hit deputies as a question that the NDS echoed as a line of effort; then Cost Assessment & Program Evaluation (CAPE) and the services translated the lines into Program Objective Memorandum (POM) issues, moving money toward range, magazines, tankers, basing kits and C2 resilience. By budget build, Resource Management Decisions (RMDs) and Justification Books read like compliance with strategy rather than a wish list. Deputy’s Management Action Group (DMAG) meetings provided the governance handrail tying strategy text to resourcing choices.

Placement & Binding: The Human Circuit

Binding was personnel, not sentiment—RAND analysts rotated through ONA, service futures cells and CAPE; ONA fellows seeded Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) and concept shops that recycled the same metrics; DMAG editors lifted ONA phrasing straight into decision binders so debate collapsed to numbers inside the frame. The official DoD release on Marshall and ONA’s purpose anchors this human circuit in the department’s own record.

Synthesis: The Runtime Function

Marshall’s runtime was a scenario-to-signal conveyor built on ‘task-indirection.’ ONA’s studies and games fixed the competitive landscape and posed the critical questions. The National Defense Strategy would then formally adopt these questions as task lines, forcing the services to answer them in their budget bids. The power was in the method: by defining the strategic risk in precise, quantitative terms, the clause created a budgetary obligation—the money had to move to buy the risk down.

• Inputs: ONA studies/games
• Outputs: NDS task lines and POM shifts

Force structure moves because the clause defines the risk as owned unless money buys it down.

3. Mark & Matthew Cancian — CSIS / Naval War College

• Ribbon: Campaign Models → Wargame Outputs → NATO/Hill Talking Points → Options Menus
• Lane / Era: Capability & Readiness Analytics | Peak Influence 2010s–present
• House(s): CSIS | U.S. Naval War College Wargaming Dept.
• Role Type: Engineer

Imprint: The Operating Code

The Cancian father/son pairing operationalises campaign logic by turning open-source, iterated wargames into policy-ready outputs—reports, slide decks, and short talking points that committees and ministries can lift verbatim.

The imprint is a sequenced body of studies—each iterated, methodised, and aimed at staff pickup. It begins with The First Battle of the Next War (Jan 2023), a Chinese invasion game run 24 iterations with MIT’s Eric Heginbotham, which standardised the CSIS campaign-method and put losses, stockpiles and basing into staff-ready numbers. On that chassis the team executed 15 nuclear iterations in Confronting Armageddon (Dec 2024), explicitly “modifying its existing U.S.–China wargame to include nuclear weapons” to test escalation triggers, off-ramps and failure modes during a Taiwan contingency. They then extended the series to a blockade problem in Lights Out? (Jul 2025), publishing a 26-game matrix of convoy, interdiction and escalation branches—deliberately sized for direct citation in hearings, ministry briefs and options menus. Net effect—the Cancians’ imprint is a three-step Taiwan suite: invasion → nuclear escalation overlay → blockade, each with transparent method and iteration counts engineered for policy translation.

All sized for direct citation in hearings or staff papers, Matthew Cancian’s billet in the Naval War College Wargaming Department provides the rehearsal stage and method continuity, while Mark Cancian carries the material into CSIS products aimed squarely at Hill and allied audiences.

Banner & rite — the stage

The rite is disciplined and public-facing: fix the scenario space with a published methodology, run repeated games, and publish a report that fuses model inputs, adjudication rules, and headline results into a single artefact. CSIS’s Wargaming & Scenarios programme functions as the convening venue; the Naval War College provides practitioner credibility and access to exercise craft. This staging lets Hill offices and NATO staff brief from the same pages they saw in open source—no classified handoff required.

The kit — pre-formatted components

Their kit is a library of installable units expressed in ordinary staff nouns. Campaign models yield force-flow tables, salvo balances, loss exchanges, and stockpile burn curves; adjudication notes reduce kill-chain and basing assumptions to time–distance ladders and magazine depth; results pages are written as bullets a member or minister can quote. First Battle standardised the template—“24 iterations,” “dozens of ships lost,” “hundreds of aircraft lost”—while Lights Out? adds blockade scenarios with convoy, interdiction, and escalation branches. These are already phrased for pick-up in NATO or Hill remarks.

Chain enforcement — metrics → scenarios → clauses → installs

Metrics are fixed first—platform counts, munition inventories, runway and pier throughput, kill probabilities—then exercised across invasion and blockade scenarios with pass–fail gates. The reports surface clause-sized directives a staffer can drop straight into a brief: pre-position fuel and munitions, buy back range, increase days of fire, disperse aircraft, harden bases. Because those lines arrive stamped with an open, replicable method, they become talking points that drive options menus for members and allied planners rather than invitations to argue assumptions. The method’s portability is visible in CSIS–MIT nuclear iterations and follow-on commentary in practitioner outlets under headlines like: “US nuclear build-up would not help deter China from using atomic weapons in Taiwan, war game finds” (Financial Times, 13 Dec 2024) and “‘Strategic Disruption’ Can Thwart an Invasion of Taiwan” (U.S. Naval Institute, Dec 2024 Proceedings Vol. 150/12/1,462).

[Scenarios] “The greatest pressure for nuclear use came when China teams reached a crisis: their invasion was in danger of a defeat that might threaten Chinese Communist Party rule.”
[Metrics] “This threshold—prospect of regime-endangering failure—was the trigger condition observed across iterations.”
[Clauses] “To dissuade China from gambling for resurrection—using nuclear weapons to salvage a failing conventional campaign—U.S. diplomacy was much more important than nuclear brinkmanship.”
[Metrics→Scenarios] “Favourable outcomes were possible, but total victory was unachievable.”
[Clauses] “The United States must therefore be prepared to prosecute a high-end conventional war while simultaneously providing face-saving off-ramps to the adversary.”
[Installs] “To do otherwise risks a nuclear holocaust, as the games demonstrated in three iterations.” (Source: CSIS, “Wargaming Nuclear Deterrence and Its Failures in a U.S.–China Conflict over Taiwan” 13 Dec 2024)

Distribution — logistics of inevitability

Output cadence is designed to meet the political calendar. The report launch provides a digestible executive summary, graphics, and a media cycle; committee staff pull the same numbers into hearing prep, and members echo them in statements and questioning. CSIS then briefs caucuses and allied delegations; in parallel, committees run table-top simulations with CSIS facilitation to convert bullets into lived options—the House Select Committee on the CCP publicised exactly such a CSIS-run simulation on the defence industrial base and Taiwan. From there, lines appear in NATO/ally briefs and POM issue papers as “risk buy-downs” tied to munitions stockpiles, base resilience, and dispersal.

Placement & binding — the human circuit

Placement rests on two bridges: institutional biographies and repeatable artefacts. Mark Cancian brings OMB and programming fluency to CSIS outputs, making the prose legible to budgeteers; Matthew Cancian teaches and designs games inside the Naval War College, ensuring the same verbs show up in exercises and classroom injects. Their co-authorship—and the cross-walk with MIT Security Studies Program on nuclear dynamics—keeps the lexicon unified across think tank, schoolhouse, and media. The result is familiar phrasing showing up in member remarks, service concepts, and subsequent exercise injects. Hill-facing simulation announcements show the talking-points-to-options loop.

Synthesis — runtime function

The Cancians run a public conveyor—campaign models and iterated games that translate uncertainty into staff-ready artefacts. Their value is transposability across venues, so Hill offices and NATO desks can lift the same phrasing without a classified handoff.

• Inputs: campaign models, scenario books, adjudication rules, force-flow tables, salvo balances, logistics arcs, loss exchanges, stockpile burn curves, exercise injects, open PDFs sized for citation.
• Outputs: NATO/Hill talking points, clause-sized requirements, options menus, committee statements, tabletop agendas, NDS task lines, POM issue papers, budget justifications, posture changes.

The effect is enforced grammar—metrics and scenarios produce clauses that arrive as options rather than advocacy. Once the lines exist in staff notes and hearing packets, programmers treat them as compliance items and budget to the frame.

4. Kagan–Nuland Set — Brookings/AEI/ISW ↔ State

• Ribbon: Campaign Maps & Op-eds (Kagans) → Daily Briefs / CNAS-style framing → NATO/Hill Talkers → State/NSC Operation Menus (Nuland pen)
• Lane / Era: Campaign-mapping & narrative-to-policy translation — peak influence 2007–2025 (ISW launch 2007; Georgia 2008; Ukraine 2014–2025; CNAS→State bridge 2018–2024).
• House(s): Brookings | AEI/CTP ↔ ISW | CNAS → U.S. Department of State
• Role Type: Engineer

Imprint: The Operating Code

To read this network’s leverage, start with the binding ties—personal and institutional—then the shared school. This network’s power comes from its ability to operate simultaneously across all these domains—the ivory tower (Brookings), the advocacy think tank (AEI), the real-time intelligence shop (ISW), the government-feeder (CNAS), and the halls of power (State).

Family & professional ties. This is a family operation with institutional span. Robert Kagan (Brookings) is married to Victoria Nuland (former Under Secretary of State; ex-CNAS CEO); Frederick W. Kagan (AEI/CTP) is Robert’s brother; Kimberly Kagan, Frederick’s spouse, founded Institute for the Study of War (ISW) in 2007— a daily campaign-mapping shop that states it is used by policymakers. The result is a tight bloc connecting academia and essay platforms (Robert), operational mapping in think tanks (Frederick & Kimberly via ISW/AEI), and the diplomatic pen inside government (Nuland).

The “neocon” school. The set is routinely identified with neoconservatism—an ideological posture marked by assertive U.S. leadership, willingness to use force in defence of liberal order, scepticism toward revisionist rivals, alliance-building, and moral-political framing of conflicts. Robert Kagan is commonly profiled as a leading neoconservative public intellectual whose work maps directly onto this posture. Nuland’s senior State roles—Under Secretary for Political Affairs and Acting Deputy Secretary—positioned her to translate such frames into official lines; the public record marks her 2024 departure from those posts while noting the Ukraine portfolio she advanced.

Banner & rite — the stage

The stage is distributed yet rhythmic. ISW’s daily assessments and maps (self-described as supporting policymakers) provide the moving picture; Brookings op-eds frame stakes; AEI/CTP research plus ISW briefs condense verbs; State testimony under Nuland used similar nouns and frames (add specific hearing/text when you have it). The network amplifies one worldview across multiple platforms at once—maps and essays outside, staff prose inside—so committee packets and NATO talkers inherit a pre-formatted menu rather than an open-ended debate..

The kit — pre-formatted components

What moves are installable objects expressed in ordinary staff nouns: campaign maps and takeaways from ISW that compress front-line changes into bullets; talker decks distilled from op-eds and briefs; and hearing language that mirrors those bullets in government cadence. ISW’s methodology pages and daily updates supply the “where/what” in repeatable formats, while Brookings pieces—Kagan on NATO’s stress points or the return of state-on-state rivalry—supply the “why now,” readable straight into a member’s opening statement. CNAS-style memos and podcasts during Nuland’s tenure reinforce the bridge between think-tank framing and executive-branch prose, so the same nouns appear in both lanes.

Chain enforcement — metrics → scenarios → clauses → installs

Metrics arrive via ISW: force dispositions, axis-by-axis gains/losses, munitions and logistics indicators. Scenarios appear in the op-ed and event lane: alliance credibility, escalation risk, sanctions endurance, replenishment timelines. Clauses show up in State/NSC phrasing—Nuland’s testimony threads the same nouns into action verbs and thresholds that committees can adopt as oversight lines. Installs follow when NATO/Hill talkers and aid-vote packets mirror the language—by the time the House moved the Ukraine supplemental after months of deadlock, the packet logic already matched the daily briefs’ risk frames, reducing debate to numbers inside an accepted picture.

[Metrics] “Delays in U.S. assistance have enabled Russia to break out of positional warfare—air-defense gaps now permit thousands of glide-bomb drops on Ukrainian positions, artillery shortages let armored columns move with tolerable loss, and over 360 km² have been seized since January.”
[Scenarios] “Absent rapid resumption of U.S. aid, Russian advances will accelerate through 2024–2025, with a live branch where Ukraine cannot hold current lines and a downstream branch that drives toward NATO borders from the Black Sea to central Poland.”
[Clauses] “Therefore, the United States must immediately restore air-defense and artillery flows at scale sufficient to stabilize the front at present locations—there is no third option.”
[Installs] “Policy must encode this as guidance and resourcing: internalize the risk, fund the specified munitions and air-defense packages, and execute delivery timelines that pre-empt acceleration of Russian gains.” (Source: ISW, America’s Stark Choice in Ukraine and the Cost of Letting Russia Win, 16 April 2024)

Distribution — logistics of inevitability

Cadence is keyed to votes and summits—the ISW update lands daily; Brookings publishes or convenes on a slower drumbeat; State testifies or briefs before and after milestone decisions. This process is visible in the run-up to the 2022 invasion. The sequence below—drawn from Victoria Nuland’s Senate opening statement, 7 December 2021—shows the chain metrics → scenarios → clauses → installs being presented to lawmakers, pre-formatting the policy response months in advance:

[Metrics] “Russia has positioned close to 100,000 troops around Ukraine’s eastern and northern borders and from the south via Crimea—roughly 100 BTGs, nearly all ready ground forces west of the Urals—while expanding destabilisation assets and information operations.”
[Scenarios] “Capacity is being built to act decisively in early 2022; intent remains uncertain, but the playbook mirrors 2014 on a larger, more lethal scale.”
[Clauses] “Given uncertainty in intentions and timing, prepare for all contingencies—treat the force assembly and IO posture as triggers for allied coordination, surge ISR, and defensive aid flows.”
[Installs] “Translate preparation into tasking and resourcing—activate contingency plans, issue guidance for posture adjustments, and align assistance packages to counter BTG mass and information operations.”

When Nuland appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in March 2022 and January 2023, her language tracked the open-source map and alliance-support frame—useful symmetry for staff drafting questions, summaries and post-hearing memos. Follow-through is visible on the vote clock—House passage of Ukraine supplemental, 20 Apr 2024 (311–112), then Senate passage, 23 Apr 2024 (79–18)—with staff work and member statements narrowed to amounts and timelines rather than reframing the premise.

Placement & binding — the human circuit

Binding rides personnel and products. The Kagans sit astride ISW/AEI and the campaign-mapping lane; Robert Kagan’s Brookings platform carries longer-form stakes; Nuland’s path through CNAS into State supplies the government pen. With daily ISW artefacts, op-ed-grade stakes and on-the-record State phrasing moving in parallel, committee packets and NATO briefs can lift the same words with minimal edit—consensus arrives formatted.

Synthesis — The Runtime Function

A campaign-map-to-menu conveyor—the outside lane manufactures the picture and stakes, the inside lane converts them into tasks and spend. ISW supplies a daily situational baseline that narrows uncertainty; Brookings packages the stakes so they travel; State translates those nouns into clause-ready guidance; Hill/NATO treat the clauses as compliance rails aligned to vote and summit clocks.

• Inputs — ISW daily assessments and maps; AEI/CTP threat digests; Brookings op-eds and events; staff slides and problem statements; open-source charts sized for citation.
• Outputs — committee talkers and member statements; State/NSC guidance lines; NATO brief decks and communiqués; supplemental-aid mark-ups and POM issue papers.

The effect is procedural gravity—once the language lands in packets, argument collapses to timing and quantities rather than frame.

5. Seth G. Jones — RAND Afghanistan/force-structure budgeteer

• Ribbon: “Independent” Study → DoD Justifications → Appropriations Language → Program Lock — Afghanistan COIN/ANSF analyses feed force-structure, readiness and sustainment tables that budgeteers lift into J-books
• Lane / Era: RAND/FFRDC force-structure scaffolding → CSIS options engineering — peak influence 2009–2016 (Afghanistan surge → transition), second phase 2017–2025 (great-power competition and the defense industrial base)
• House(s): RAND → OSD/CAPE & service programmers → HAC/SAC appropriations
• Role Type: Engineer

Imprint: The Operating Code

Seth G. Jones built a theatre-to-tables pathway—a method for converting Afghanistan’s campaign requirements into budget-legible numbers. He published “independent” analyses through RAND—an FFRDC (Federally Funded Research and Development Center) with formal review—leveraging that status to badge prescriptive force-sizing as method. Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan (2008) fixed the through-line—campaign success turns on large indigenous security forces, especially police, plus explicit sustainment and governance rails—yielding a citation-safe scaffold for programmers.

He then carried the same grammar into Congress—testifying on strategy, extremist groups and force requirements across the surge and transition years—so tables and thresholds from RAND reappeared with minimal edit in Afghanistan Security Forces Fund (ASFF) justification books (e.g., end-strength to 352,000, sustainment days-of-supply) and related exhibits. The pattern is observable rather than mystical—study → testimony → ASFF/CTPF J-book language within the same appropriations cycle.

His CSIS phase broadened the habit—applying campaign metrics and options menus to wider force-planning while keeping the install logic. Functionally, Jones acts as a translator—turning the language of war into numbers a budget can obey—so debates gravitate from whether to adopt the framework to how much funding is required to meet its pre-defined gates. House testimony (2009 CT-324); HASC 2020 statement; SIGAR conditionality audit (2014–2019).

Banner & rite — the stage

The rite starts in RAND rooms and ends in budget binders. Reports and testimonies articulate end-strength ladders, readiness gates, sustainment minima—phrased as neutral method—then DoD converts them into ASFF J-Book tables (ANA/ANP/AAF end-strength, training/sustainment lines, force-structure exhibits) that programmers can lift without relitigating the premise. Receipts: FY2012 ASFF J-Book (force-structure & sustainment sections); FY2016 ASFF J-Book (ANSF end-strength up to 352,000). The ASFF program definition itself codifies the translation target— train, equip, and provide related assistance to the Afghanistan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF)—so narrative becomes obligation categories by design.

The kit — pre-formatted components

The system’s power lies in its “kit” of installable objects—pre-formatted components written in the specialised dialect of budget officials. From Jones’s studies and testimonies came the conceptual building blocks: force-mix logic (the ideal ratio of army to police to special forces), advisor throughput targets, unit readiness bands, sustainment burn-rates, and ministerial-capacity gates.

These abstract concepts were then translated directly into the concrete, tabulated formats of official Pentagon budget justifications (J-Books). This included:

• End-strength tables for the Afghan National Army (ANA), Police (ANP), and Air Force (AAF).
• Training & operations exhibits detailing costs and timelines.
• Sustainment cost curves projecting long-term expenses.
• Equipment lines and force-structure summaries.

This kit allowed budgeteers to lift complex strategic needs directly into budget exhibits without having to relitigate the underlying premises, turning analysis into obligation with minimal friction.

Chain enforcement — metrics → scenarios → clauses → installs

Jones’s method enforced a predictable conversion chain. It began with Metrics lifted directly from his RAND analyses: Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) end-strength, advisor throughput, and unit readiness rates. He framed these numbers within urgent Scenarios—the “surge” and the “transition to Afghan-led security”—to stress-test the metrics and create policy windows. This produced budget-ready Clauses: directive phrases like “maintain up to 352,000 ANSF” and “fund sustainment to a minimum of Y days.” The final Install occurred when these clauses were embedded as binding exhibits in the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund (ASFF) justification books and, ultimately, in congressional appropriations language that conditioned funds on meeting the very benchmarks he had defined—a finality later audited and confirmed by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). The FY2016 ASFF overview shows the chain in action:

[Metrics] “The FY2016 ASFF request supports an end-strength of up to 352,000 ANSF—195,000 ANA, 157,000 ANP, plus up to 30,000 ALP (total 382,000).”
[Scenarios] “This budget continues the transition from OEF to OFS under NATO Resolute Support, focusing on train, advise, assist to strengthen ASI and ANSF—Kabul-centric, strategically focused, optimising ANSF at operational and tactical levels toward a professionalised, self-sustaining force.”
[Clauses] “We will enhance ASI critical systems (budget, procurement, logistics), refine maintenance training and compliance, rebalance sustainment and procurement to integrate capabilities, and instil fiscal discipline with accountability and transparency—guided by a master performance framework synchronising TAA goals, missions and tasks, with added emphasis on intelligence, aviation, and ANASOF.”
[Installs] “Stable resourcing is critical, and DoD–NATO support activities must be complementary to execute these lines of effort—embedding the framework in ASFF programming and allied support to secure long-term sustainment.

Distribution — logistics of inevitability

Jones’s distribution followed a disciplined, personal cadence. He would first seed a RAND report, then personally deliver its core nouns and thresholds in targeted Hill testimony. This dual-track release—study plus live witness—ensured his analytical framework was circulating just as OSD(CAPE) and service programmers were drafting the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund (ASFF) justification books. These officials would port his phrasing directly into binding budget exhibits. By the time the House and Senate Appropriations Committees (HAC/SAC) marked up the bills, his language had already been hardened into official DoD guidance, allowing legislators to simply echo it in their report language and attach conditions. The result was that by the final vote, concepts like the ANSF end-strength—which Jones had introduced—were treated not as his advocacy, but as established, programmatic fact.

Placement & binding — the human circuit

Binding is institutional, not rhetorical. FFRDC credibility lets RAND language cross the bureaucratic membrane; CAPE and the services inherit it as program exhibits; appropriators harden it with conditions and directed reports; auditors (SIGAR/DoD IG) later measure compliance against those very gates—closing the loop that recodes a theatre thesis as fiscal law. This closed-loop system is vividly illustrated in Jones’s own 2017 congressional testimony, where the complete chain from diagnosis to prescribed action is laid out in a single statement:

[METRICS] “There are more U.S. military forces (approximately 8,400 soldiers) deployed to Afghanistan than any other active combat zone, and a range of Islamic extremist groups—from the Taliban to al-Qaeda and Islamic State—have a sanctuary in Afghanistan...”
[SCENARIOS] “...Additional Taliban advances on the battlefield or a U.S. withdrawal would likely allow al-Qaeda, Islamic State, and other groups to increase their presence... [and] could foster a perception... that the United States is not a reliable ally... extremist groups would likely view a withdrawal... as their most important victory since the departure of Soviet forces...”
[CLAUSES] “...it is important for the United States to set realistic goals... The United States should establish an enduring partnership with Afghanistan and leave a small but durable military and diplomatic presence. But it should set limited objectives: prevent the Taliban from overthrowing the Afghan government... and target terrorist and insurgent groups that threaten the United States.”
[INSTALLS] “Combating terrorist groups in Afghanistan must therefore be part of a broader campaign to support an Afghan government willing to cooperate in the suppression of such groups.”
(Source: Seth G. Jones, Testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, “U.S. Counterterrorism Operations in Afghanistan and the Way Ahead,” July 25, 2017)

Synthesis — runtime function

Jones manufactures analysis-of-alternatives scaffolds that convert Afghanistan theatre metrics into obligational logic—once end-strength, readiness and sustainment gates are framed, J-book narratives and HAC/SAC directives inherit the frame and lock the program.

• Inputs — RAND Afghanistan monographs and Hill testimonies; ISAF/ANSF end-strength and readiness metrics; advisor-throughput targets; sustainment burn-rate curves; ministerial-capacity gates; SIGAR/DoD IG findings feeding thresholds.
• Outputs — ASFF/CTPF J-book exhibits and narrative justifications; CAPE/service POM issue papers; HAC/SAC report and explanatory-statement clauses with conditionality; DSCA commitment letters and directed-reporting tasks that lock programming to the gates.

Jones’ pipeline turns RAND theatre metrics into fiscal law—the studies and testimony define end-strength, readiness and sustainment gates; CAPE and the services lift them into ASFF/CTPF J-books; HAC/SAC clauses, reinforced by SIGAR/IG oversight, cement program lock across the POM cycle.

6. Philip Zelikow — Miller Center/Hoover ↔ Commission/State

• Ribbon: Research Frame → Commission Text → Counselor Pen → National Strategy
• Lane / Era: Commission-to-strategy text engineering — peak influence 2003–2007 (9/11 Commission → State Counselor → 2006 NSS), with a later think-tank reprise 2016–2024.
• House(s): Miller Center, UVA → 9/11 Commission (Executive Director) → U.S. Department of State (Counselor, 2005–2007) → Hoover Institution
• Role Type: Engineer

Imprint: The Operating Code

During his early career, Philip Zelikow assembled a reusable pathway for installing clause-grade language into strategy—venue control, toolmaking, delivery drill.

Educated at the University of Houston (BA), the University of Chicago Law School (JD), and Tufts/Fletcher (MA, PhD), he mixed historian’s method with legal drafting and diplomatic process—useful because his core outputs are about how prose becomes orders.

His scholarship supplied the kit rather than the verdict—Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (2nd ed., co-authored with Graham Allison) distilled decision anatomy into teachable clauses; Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (with Condoleezza Rice) modelled architectural statecraft; The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis (with Ernest May) operationalised the case-method for modern crisis—each text a blueprint for phrasing that staff can lift.

Inside the NSC (1989–91) during German reunification he learned the Deputies’ Process—how a draft becomes guidance—while at Harvard/Belfer (with Ernest May) he refined the case-method into policy clauses that travel.

At UVA’s Miller Center he built a public staging ground for presidential operating craft—venue first, exportable phrasing second.

In elite outlets he helped seed pre-formatted doctrine—“Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger” (Foreign Affairs, 1998, with Ashton Carter and John Deutch) framed a mass-casualty attack as a homeland-shattering event that mandates institutional redesign—one sentence, installation-ready.

Paired with interagency-architecture habits (fusion, warning, continuity) and commission-ready prose (numbered, cite-safe recommendations), the system was pre-deployed by 2001—coin clauses, proof them, route via NSC craft (metrics → scenarios → clauses), stage them for the crisis “install window.” By 2001 the venues, vocabulary and drill were in place; crisis supplied the install window.

Banner & rite — the stage

Post 9/11, Zelikow’s influence was forged in two powerful, consecutive stages. The first was the commission room. On becoming Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, he oversaw the staff work and report text that fixed post-attack recommendations in numbered, cite-safe paragraphs (language designed for maximum authority and minimal legal risk, making it easy for bureaucrats to adopt verbatim).

The second stage moved this narrative from the page into practice. As Counselor to the Secretary of State (2005–2007), Zelikow occupied a unique position to shape and contest policy. He held deputy-level policy duties during the Iraq rethink and the 2006 National Security Strategy (NSS) cycle. His Feb 2006 interrogation-policy dissent entailed a direct intervention at the highest levels, attempting to reshape the very phrasing that authorised and guided operational practice.

The kit — pre-formatted components

The Commission’s staff statements and its final report did more than just describe problems; they established the definitive narrative around systemic threats, institutional gaps, and necessary reforms. This narrative became the baseline for action. The Commission’s recommendations were formally tracked as implementation checklists by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The grammar of the report—its focus on prevention, alliances, and institutional transformation—was directly echoed in the 2006 National Security Strategy (NSS).

From the 9/11 Commission Report, (pp. 399-400) we find:

On diagnosing the “disease” of institutional failure:
“These are often characterized as problems of ‘watchlisting,’ of ‘information sharing,’ or of ‘connecting the dots.’... These labels are too narrow. They describe the symptoms, not the disease. In each of our examples, no one was firmly in charge... Responsibility and accountability were diffuse.”
On defining the required new structure and ethos:
“The United States has the resources and the people. The government should combine them more effectively, achieving unity of effort... When agencies cooperate, one defines the problem and seeks help with it. When they act jointly, the problem and options for action are defined differently from the start.”
On the necessity of a generational overhaul:
“The men and women of the World War II generation rose to the challenges of the 1940s and 1950s. They restructured the government so that it could protect the country. That is now the job of the generation that experienced 9/11. Americans should not settle for incremental, ad hoc adjustments to a system designed generations ago for a world that no longer exists.”

Chain enforcement — metrics → scenarios → clauses → installs

The 9/11 Commission’s findings created a self-reinforcing logic chain that Zelikow helped translate into policy. The 2006 National Security Strategy (Overview) carries familiar constructions—“regime character,” “allied cooperation against terror,” “institutional transformation”—that echo the report’s diagnosis of networks, prevention and whole-of-government reform, giving staff a clear crosswalk from public report to strategy chapter headings. Lineage, not penmanship: the Commission’s problem-grammar → executive task-grammar to text:

[Metrics] “In the world today, the fundamental character of regimes matters as much as the distribution of power… The goal of our statecraft is to help create a world of democratic, well-governed states….”
[Scenarios] “Achieving this goal is the work of generations. The United States is in the early years of a long struggle… a new totalitarian ideology now threatens….”
[Clauses] “The United States must: Champion aspirations for human dignity; strengthen alliances…; prevent our enemies… with WMD; … transform America’s national security institutions….”
[Installs] “The United States Government will work to advance human dignity in word and deed… allocating appropriate resources to advance these ideals.”

Distribution — logistics of inevitability

Cadence made adoption the path of least resistance—commission findings arrived as numbered, cite-safe paragraphs that agencies could drop into drafts without legal risk or re-litigation. Fixed clocks then removed room for alternatives: post-9/11 reorganisation, the Iraq review, and the statutory NSS deadline demanded text on schedule, so the nearest authoritative wording became the working copy. Personnel rotations closed the circuit—commission drafters and adjacent experts moved into front-office and interagency seats, carrying the same nouns into decision papers, taskers and guidance. Oversight cemented the checklist—GAO, IGs and Hill staff audited against the published recommendations, so departments wrote to those items to pre-empt findings. Risk shifted inside the frame—once the language was set, disputes collapsed to quantities, sequencing and milestones rather than premises. Bipartisan cover finished the funnel—the commission’s public legitimacy made its phrasing the safest option for counsel and principals.

Placement & binding — the human circuit

Zelikow sits at the junction of research, commission text and executive pen—director at the Miller Center, then Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission overseeing staff statements and the report’s numbered recommendations, then Counselor of the Department of State (2005–2007) during the Iraq review and the 2006 National Security Strategy cycle—precisely where commission phrasing can become strategy clauses and interagency taskers. His February 2006 dissenting memorandum on interrogation policy evidences Counselor-level intervention in legal-policy baselines; after State he returns to Hoover and Miller Center, keeping the vocabulary in public circulation.

Synthesis — runtime function

Zelikow’s runtime is a report-to-strategy conveyor—fix the language in a national commission, carry it into the State front office, and publish it back out as strategy chapters departments can cite.

• Inputs: Commission findings and staff statements
• Outputs: Counselor memos and NSS lines—cross walked so implementation becomes a schedule, not a debate.

Synthesis — The Engineers’ Runtime

Across six cases the move is consistent—turn frames into fixtures by running the chain on a clock: metrics reduce the world to tables, scenarios bind those numbers to futures, clauses compress futures into governing text, installs make the text default in budgets, directives and standards. Corbett seeds exam-to-order prose; Marshall converts competitive math into NDS task lines; the Cancians publish wargame losses and stockpiles as staff-ready talkers; the Kagan–Nuland set synchronises daily maps and testimony with vote windows; Jones ports theatre metrics into ASFF J-books; Zelikow carries commission grammar into strategy chapters—each cuts dovetails so one link seats in the next without rework.

• Inputs — campaign metrics, scenario books, commission findings, schoolhouse notes, FFRDC studies, daily maps.
• Outputs — routing orders, NDS task lines, committee talkers, J-book exhibits, NSS chapters, appropriations clauses.

The net effect is that argument collapses to timing and quantities inside the pre-set grammar, while procedure displaces persuasion.

Published via Journeys by the Styx.

Overlords: Mapping the Operators of reality and rule.

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Author’s Note

Produced using the Geopolitika analysis system—an integrated framework for structural interrogation, elite systems mapping, and narrative deconstruction.