Age of Danger: Keeping America Safe in an Era of New Superpowers, New Weapons, and New Threats

An urgent look at how America's national security machine went astray and how it fails to keep us safe--and what we can do to fix it.

Again and again, American taxpayers are asked to open their wallets and pay for a national security machine that costs $1 trillion operate. Yet time and time again, the US government gets it wrong on critical issues. So what can be done? Enter bestselling author Thom Shanker and defense expert Andrew Hoehn. With decades of national security expertise between them and access to virtually every expert, they look at what's going wrong in national security and how to make it go right.

Age of Danger looks at the major challenges facing America--from superpowers like Russia and China to emerging threats like pandemics, cybersecurity, climate change, and drones--and reimagines the national security apparatus into something that can truly keep Americans safe. Weaving together expert analysis with exclusive interviews from a new generation of national security leaders, Shanker and Hoehn argue that the United States must create an industrial-grade, life-saving machine out of a system that, for too long, was focused only on deterring adversaries and carrying out global military operations. It is a timely and crucial call to action--a call that if heeded, could save Americans lives, money, and our very future on the global stage.


About the Author

Andrew Hoehn is Senior Vice President and Director of Research at the RAND Corporation. He was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, responsible for developing and implementing U.S. defense strategy, force planning and assessments, and long-range policy planning.

Thom Shanker is the director of the Project for Media and National Security. He was the National Security/Foreign Policy Editor for the New York Times' Washington Bureau, and is co-author of the New York Times bestseller Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda.