On Red Team’s Closure

Five years ago, Red Team was closed by the then US Department of Defense. It was done as part of the Trump Administration, in what I consider a transitionary period from its old identity as the DoD into the new Department of War.

As someone who went through the program, I view Red Teaming as a core part of my professional identity. It helped me grow into a more effective analyst. Yet, I can say, painfully but honestly, that in my professional opinion, the closure was 100% justified. I welcome the move toward a leaner, more focused military.

The lessons themselves remain essential. Red Teaming was built to counter the failure modes that have produced bad decisions and foreseeable surprises in military doctrine. The principles still matter. The delivery system, however, had started to suffer from bloat.

Many of its tools required processing time, structured facilitation, and focused attention with the assumption that busy leaders could function like a permanent think tank. In practice, this often slowed decision-making. Leaders hesitated, worried about unseen events no one had anticipated. The process should turn into an exercise in avoiding shortcuts, because shortcuts and heuristics are the things that can sometimes lead to catastrophic failure.

If I had been given budget authority during that period, I would have made different choices. Faced with a binary “keep or kill,” I would have chosen to end the program. But offered a third path, keep the essence while pruning the excess, I would have retained roughly 20% of the original structure and rebuilt everything else around speed, judgment, and integration with modern AI tools.

SAR, Self Assessment & Reflection, is still conceptually important but was significantly over-engineered. You can cut it down into a 30-minute journaling exercise along with Kolb’s experiential learning cycle for specific skills (Kolb, 1984).

GTM suffered from the same excess. GTM is fine but also overdone.

Fostering Cultural Empathy, FCE, has become outdated. Two decades ago the premise that we needed structured exercises to build cultural empathy made sense; it helped planners see problems through lenses they might otherwise miss. Today the context has shifted. Empathy untethered from strategic judgment can itself produce self-defeating outcomes. In the era of progressivism, the risk is no longer insufficient empathy, but instead empathy applied indiscriminately. I would replace FCE with a sharper module on “Directed Empathy” or “Strategic Perspective-Taking”: the disciplined ability to inhabit an adversary’s or partner’s worldview long enough to anticipate their moves, then return to one’s own objectives with clearer eyes.

ACT is the one section I would keep and modernize, stripping away lengthy checklists and replacing them with rapid, judgment-focused drills.

In short, I would remove the toolkit of prescribed questions and multi-day facilitated sessions. The goal would be to embed the red-teaming stance directly into everyday planning rather than treating it as a separate, resource-intensive event.

The shift to a leaner model makes sense for several clear reasons.

Red Teaming was never wrong in principle. It simply became too heavy, too slow, and too expensive for the strategic environment it now inhabits.

Here is why the old model no longer fits:

• Red Teaming was designed to surface failure modes, biases, mirror-imaging, and unexamined assumptions that have historically produced strategic surprise.
• Its tools once required weeks of workshops and scarce facilitation to generate new perspectives.
• Artificial intelligence has made generation dramatically cheaper. LLMs and adversarial models can now produce dozens of high-quality red-team outputs in minutes.
• The remaining bottleneck is no longer perspective generation but rapid, high-quality judgment: knowing which perspectives matter, which shortcuts are acceptable, and when analysis must end and decision-making must begin.
• The repeated focus on federal efficiency and budget discipline sends a clear signal: any analytical practice that cannot demonstrate clear value per unit time becomes vulnerable.
• The Red Team stance, skeptical, adversarial, assumption-challenging, must survive and evolve. The old handbook and course architecture, however, should shrink dramatically and be re-engineered for an AI-augmented military.

The principles that made Red Teaming valuable five, ten, or twenty years ago have not disappeared. They have simply outgrown the institutional container that once held them. The future belongs to those who can preserve the spirit while discarding the weight.