This article analyzes U.S. defense planning, and more specifically the public administration of the third offset strategy. The U.S. defense bureaucracy is rooted in a tradition of rational planning, which assumes a process of consistent, value-maximizing choices within specified constrains. The cornerstone in this tradition is the program budgeting system, once created to connect plans with budgets according to preferences. The third offset strategy, aimed at dealing with the challenges of geopolitical competition and budget austerity, is influenced by a different public administration philosophy described as metagovernance. Metagovernance is a challenge to rational planning as it entails an indirect approach of organizing arenas for networks, in which start-up companies and civilian corporations get to interact with government officials in order to identify incrementally suitable acquisition projects. Furthermore, the article contextualizes this tendency in reflexive modernity, in which rationality breaks down due to the pace of societal changes and planning processes constantly become subject to feedback.

This chapter tries to supplement some of the early efforts to interpret the development of NATO’s partnership policy, as well as to widen it somewhat into a military operational perspective. Three official speeches on the executive level in the US are analyzed, including their references to military doctrines, in order to find the strategic rationale that underpins the new globalized partnership agenda. Two operational frameworks can be identified for the US: networking and access. Networking is centered on the decapitation of enemies and is being pursued in an on-going global or transnational shadow war. Access is centered on deterrence in Asia. Both frameworks rest on the concept of partnerships, and this is a contributory factor for their growing importance in the Alliance. This ‘partnerfication’ of NATO will certainly contribute to flexibility, but there is a clear risk that it will not be in the interests of all European states, members or partners alike.

This article has mapped and analyzed internationaldefence cooperation with an emphasis on developments in NATO. In the mapping ofthe processes of defence cooperation initiatives in NATO after the Cold War and9/11, we concluded that there has been a steady stream of capabilitycatalogues, coordination measures and creation of joint ventures. In theanalysis we noted the different types of defence cooperation initiatives(sharing of capabilities, pooling of capabilities, role- and task sharing,co-development, and pooling of acquisitions), the character of the process(sequential and repetitive), and the dynamic and conditions (trade off dynamicsinfluenced by perceived gains, degree of solidarity, strategic similarities,degree of common understanding of political investment, and geographicproximity). The final part of the text elaborated on the potential consequencesof international defence cooperation; in this part we concluded that the threecategories, that might well mirror the future of the transatlantic securityarchitecture, are minimal defence cooperation, flexible defence cooperation orregional defence integration.