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President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Elbridge A. Colby (USJLP 2010-2011) to serve as the Pentagon’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Pending Senate approval, Colby will assume a pivotal role advising and supporting the defense secretary on strategy, planning, and international alliances.
Colby, a member of the United States-Japan Foundation’s US-Japan Leadership Program network, is a seasoned national security expert. He previously served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development (2017–2018), where he was a principal architect of the 2018 National Defense Strategy. This landmark document highlighted the strategic challenges posed by China’s rise and refocused U.S. defense policy accordingly.
Since leaving government, Colby has continued to shape defense policy through his work as Director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security and as co-founder of The Marathon Initiative, which specializes in great-power competition.
In keeping with Trump’s calls for U.S. allies to increase military spending, Colby has repeatedly argued that Japan should allocate at least 3% of its GDP to defense. This is a significant increase from the government’s current plan to raise spending to 2%, and one many Japanese defense analysts have deemed unfeasible. In October, he questioned on X (formerly Twitter), “Why isn’t Japan spending 3% of GDP on defense now?” In a December article in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, he reiterated, “The current target of [Japan] increasing defense spending to 2% of GDP by 2027 is not enough.”
Colby joins Mike Waltz (USJLP 2016-2017) in Trump’s cabinet with the many USJLP Fellows currently serving in political office in both the United States and Japan.
