
Jeffrey Becker
President, Context LLC; Senior Futurist, Futures and Concepts Division, Joint Staff J7; External Contributor
Contact information
Biography
Jeff Becker is a defense consultant based in Chesapeake, Virginia and is currently the senior futurist at the Futures and Concepts Division of the Joint Staff J7.
Mr. Becker has nearly 25 years of direct experience in future military studies & analysis, and military experimentation projects. He has provided analytic support to a wide range of clients interested in considering the implications of strategic, military, and technological change for the structure and function of military forces and national strategy.
Mr. Becker was the primary author of many Joint Staff deep futures studies, including several editions of the Joint Staff’s Joint Operating Environment which surveys science and technology, human, and geopolitical trends and develops their military implications for the Joint Force. He has contributed to many joint concepts, including the most recent Capstone Concept for Joint Operations and Joint Warfighting Concept. He was the lead author of the Five Eyes Future Operating Environment written in partnership with futures experts from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the U.K.
He has worked with the Joint Staff J7, U.S. Joint Forces Command, the Defense Intelligence Agency, NATO/Allied Command Transformation, OSD/Net Assessment, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the Army and Navy. Mr. Becker has worked with a wide range of foreign partners on joint analytic projects abroad, including the NATO Alliance, FVEYS, the U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland, Chile, Peru, Indonesia, and Kyrgyzstan.
He has written on strategy, including the need for a U.S. strategic pivot to outer space, how to stop Chinese aggression in the South China Sea, and the future of nuclear deterrence. He has written military operational articles on the future of high tech terrorism and the use of reusable rocket boosters as part of a theater strike system, and the full integration of reusable rockets into the force. He has written speculative military fiction, such as Aces-High Frontier, describing conflict in outer space in 2050 and articles on attributes and tradeoffs in robotic and autonomous systems across the Joint Force, and divergent trajectories for U.S. military power going forward. His paper on future infantry was selected as the winning entry in the Army TRADOC Mad Scientists 2017 Call for Papers Visualizing Multidomain Battle, which he presented at George Washington University. He has written numerous articles on future military challenges, including for example, On “Predicting Future War, in Parameters, Contexts of Future Conflict and War in Joint Force Quarterly and “Strategic Trends and Drivers” in Stanford University Press’s Securing Freedom in the Global Commons.
Mr. Becker has a master’s degree in International Studies from Old Dominion University (2003) and a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Iowa (1992).