From 2006-2017, Adam S. Lovinger served as a strategist in the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA), where he provided direct support on long-term strategy to the Secretary of Defense.
For the first four months of the Trump Administration, Lovinger served as Senior Director for Strategic Assessments at the U.S. National Security Council (NSC).
Before the Trump Administration, the strategic assessment directorate had not existed at the NSC since 1973.
The strategic assessment portfolio was created in 1971 when Henry Kissinger brought Andrew W. Marshall from the RAND Corporation to the NSC.
On becoming Secretary of Defense in 1973, James Schlesinger transferred that role to the Pentagon, where it has stayed ever since as the Office of Net Assessment.
Since 2014, Mr. Lovinger has served as adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service, McCourt School of Public Policy and McDonough School of Business.
Working from within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) between 2006 and 2017, Mr. Lovinger conducted diagnostic analyses highlighting emerging strategic problems and opportunities confronting the Department's leadership, and identified strategic management issues relating to the long-term military competition between the U.S. and her competitors.
Mr. Lovinger’s portfolio within ONA has included net assessments and competitive strategies developed for the Secretary of Defense on:
· All elements of the long-term strategic competition between the U.S. and China in the Indian Ocean region and sub-Saharan Africa.
· How the discipline of net assessment, as developed over forty years within ONA, may inform “alliance strategy” with a specific focus on Europe, and the U.S.-India-Israel “strategic triad.”
· The long-term global strategic competition between the U.S. and “regressive” non-state forces and ideological movements.
Between November 2014 and May 2017, Mr. Lovinger led the first and only sustained government-to-government collaborative net assessment partnership with a foreign country. In January 2017, in a letter to Indian Defence Minister Parrikar, the U.S. Secretary of Defense recognized Lovinger’s pioneering U.S.-India collaborative net assessment partnership as a critical component of the U.S.-India Strategic Partnership in support of the President’s recognition of India as a Major Defense Partner.
In addition to his teaching at Georgetown University, since 2011 Mr. Lovinger has served as guest lecturer of U.S. grand strategy formation, net assessment, and the emerging U.S.-China long-term strategic competition at Yale University’s superpowers of influence series and the U.S. State Department's Foreign Service Institute.
Abroad, he has lectured and participated as a panelist for myriad private and public organizations including the German Council on Foreign Relations, Oxford University’s Changing Character of War Series, Permanent Joint Headquarters Command of the British Armed Forces, Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, United Services of Institute of India, the European Commission, and the European Parliament.
Prior to his government service, Mr. Lovinger was an international project finance lawyer in the London-based law firms Clifford Chance and Freshfields.
He holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University, and a Juris Doctor from the Georgetown University Law Center.
