Tom Ricks Calls for Readers' Essays on Future Wars

In parallel to a similar brainstorming effort by his employers at the New America Foundation, blogger-journalist-author Tom Ricks has solicited essays from readers of his blog, "The Best Defense," found at the Foreign Policy magazine website. The theme or topic? "What we should be thinking about the war after next."

Writes Ricks:

I am going to run some solicited essays on the subject. But I also want to open the blog up to others, so I am now announcing the Best Defense future of war blog post contest. This is open to all readers. 

Please keep your submissions relatively short—I want posts, not War College essays. It might be best to write about a topic with which you are personally familiar, or have studied. But if you want, you can write under this title: "What we should be thinking about the war after next."

Ricks is part of a mental task force that also includes the foundation's Peter Bergen, Rosa Brooks, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Sascha Meinrath. Bergen, the organization's director of national security studies, established in an earlier Foreign Policy blog post the intellectual engine that is driving its exercise in military futurism:

"Some argue that when U.S. combat troops finally withdraw from Afghanistan in December 2014, the nation will no longer be at war, and the 2001 AUMF [Authorization for Use of Military Force] should be repealed—or be deemed to have effectively expired." Bergen wrote. "Others argue that the end of the conflict in Afghanistan will not mark the end of U.S. efforts to use military force against terrorists in other parts of the globe, and that we need some sort of new AUMF to structure (and constrain) such future uses of force."

Click here for Ricks' original call for submissions. A No. 1 winner will be the guest of New America Foundation during an upcoming confab among experts. Runners-up will receive an autographed copy of a book by Ricks or Bergen.

Send submissions to: ricksblogcomment AT gmail.com