The NextGenWarGroup

The NextGenWarGroup began as an idea by our founder, Ethan Brown. After leaving the military in 2020, Ethan began working in the policy community as a national security and policy analyst. Ethan is the author of the “Visual Friendlies, Tally Target” trilogy (Casemate Publishers), a contemporary history of Close Air Support and Forward Air Controllers in the Global War on Terror.

While the industry has many diverse people working for innovative organizations across capitol hill, he discovered that the voices of the tactical level servicemembers — the ones charged with carrying out national security and grand strategy directives — were seldom, rarely, represented in congressional discussion and development of grand strategy. The same goes for defense industry minds at the venture capital level — too many innovative solutions that went unrepresented for consideration. The same goes for new voices in the policy community — too many echo chambers, where solutions-based ideas are often considered “not on brand” or the idea of being accountable for a published idea is “too big of a risk.” The disconnect between the servicemembers, commercial innovators, and drafters of policy ideas was a wide chasm with no evident bridge.

Across history, empires rise on the ideas of their innovators and experienced leaders, and fall when those ideas stagnate and go unheard as new challengers arise.

Today, those challengers are autocratic, authoritarian states whose sole aim is to seize the polemarch post from the United States and her allies, and reorder the world under their repressive, centralized models of power and society. Ensuring our liberal, democratic, free and open societies continued shaping of world policy demands that we explore ideas that keep the world open, integrated, and pursuing prosperity and security for all.

The objective of the NextGenWarGroup is simple: connect the ones with the problems: in readiness, force shaping, grand strategy, human hardware, and tech needs, with the ones who have solutions to those problems. This may be in the form of policy development, ideation of grand strategy, implementation of new technology, or simply recognizing the overtasked demands of the force and adapting the institution to better respond to the needs of the national security paradigm.

The NextGenWarGroup isn’t a consulting firm, nor is it a national security publication, or a think tank, or a social media network. It is somewhere at the nexus of those organizational constructs, and from it, we aim to let the best minds collaborate on our national security problems at the functional level.