Seeing as Strategy—Strategic Imagination

I never met Brendan Sargeant.

Over the past year, I’ve been pursuing a master’s in National Security Policy at RAND. From the beginning, one word kept resurfacing in our classroom discussions—imagination—most often as a critique. A lack of imagination in policy. A failure of imagination in forecasting. But until this book, I lacked the language to make the case that imagination isn’t separate from strategy. It is strategy.

This book—equal parts tribute, theory, and provocation—reminds us that strategy isn’t just a doctrine or posture. It’s a way of perceiving the world. Brendan’s work suggests that the most urgent and sustaining task of the strategist is not simply to open their own mind—but to assist in opening the minds of others.

And while this review can only engage a selection of chapters, every contributor to Strategic Imagination offers a vital dimension. Across aesthetic inquiry, bureaucratic insight, geopolitical reframing, and philosophical reflection, each chapter sharpens the premise that imagination is not a luxury of theory—it is the connective tissue between insight and integrity, policy, and personhood.

As Andrew Carr notes in his introduction—and later reflected in public tribute—Brendan’s core question was this... 

Strategic Imagination doesn’t simply honor that question. It equips the next generation to live inside it. And that’s impossible to do without first learning how to see differently.

Brendan Sargeant, who passed away unexpectedly in 2022, wasn’t your typical defense bureaucrat. He quoted William Blake in speeches. He wrote fiction and fables. He kept a personal library of 18,000 books. And yet, he helped shape Australia’s 2013 Defence White Paper and led significant institutional reform—quietly, and without self-promotion.

As Greg Moriarty writes in the preface...

“For Brendan, strategic imagination meant the ability to envision alternative futures beyond today’s challenges, combining experience—manifested in the world as it is, and imagination—manifested in the world as it might be.”

What struck me most is that Brendan didn’t treat imagination and policy as opposites. He didn’t see curiosity and capability as contradictions. In fact, contradiction was the point. “Strategic imagination,” he wrote, “is a living thing… full of contradictions.” That line sits at the book’s center—and, in many ways, at the center of what strategy ought to be.

Andrew Carr and Sita Sargeant write in their introduction that Brendan’s concept of strategic imagination “emerged from a life at the borders of practical experience and creative pursuit.” He moved between institutions and ideas, between literature and logistics. He wasn’t just building strategy. He was building meaning.

And meaning—especially in national security—isn’t found in certainty. It’s found in the courage to see. To see tension and still move forward, to see contradiction and still take responsibility, to see complexity and still imagine new forms.

Brendan first introduced the language of strategic imagination in 2006, in a piece titled Burning Bright: Defence Policy, Strategy and the Imagination. The concept appeared as a set of questions…

What do we mean when we talk about imagination? Can we read our policies, strategies and programs as products of an imagination? What do our policies and strategies tell us about our imagination? Does it make sense to talk about an Australian strategic imagination?

Those questions were not just academic. They were foundational.

What makes Strategic Imagination so distinctive is how seriously it takes imagination—not as metaphor, but as method. Anthea Roberts, drawing from François Jacob, contrasts “day science” and “night science.” The former is structured and procedural, the latter is exploratory and intuitive. “Imagination,” she writes, “helps us break free from the current set of possibilities and envisage new ways of being and moving forward.” Her chapter offers both a clear tribute to Brendan’s influence and a strategic challenge to how institutions cultivate imagination.

In many ways, Brendan’s work argues for something rarely named in national security circles…the dignity to imagine. In a world where imagination is often mistaken for indulgence—or reserved as a privilege of the powerful—he insisted that strategic imagination belongs to everyone tasked with shaping a nation’s future. He treated imagination not as flair, but as faculty.

The phrase “strategic imagination” carries an assumption, that the one imagining has earned the trust to do so. In this framing, imagination requires more than creativity. It demands intellectual depth, moral clarity, and institutional care. It is not a leap—it is a discipline.

Mark McKenna, reflecting on Australia’s failed referenda, makes this painfully clear. “If truth-telling of any kind is to change minds and hearts,” he writes, “it must begin at a local level—where it cannot be so easily kept at a distance or imagined as an abstraction.” The electorate didn’t reject reform because it lacked logic. It rejected reform because it couldn’t see itself inside the future.

Dennis Richardson—in a candid interview—offers a quiet echo of this truth. “Brendan was not mono-focused in his intellectual pursuits,” he says. “And I think that is a secret to strategic imagination.” What Brendan brought into the room wasn’t just analysis. It was perspective—rooted in literature, history, and the dignity of others.

Ian Hall draws a crucial distinction between two kinds of imagination. The first is creative imagination—the ability to generate new futures. The second is re-creative imagination—the capacity to see through the eyes of others. Strategy, he argues, requires both. Without re-creative imagination, strategy risks collapsing into blindness—mistaking our comfort zones for our security zones.

This isn’t just a theoretical problem. It’s a lived one.

Roland Bleiker brings an aesthetic lens to the persistent friction between North and South Korea. “Press coverage of the conflict is often accompanied by photographs or films of the DMZ,” he writes. “But very few people have seen and experienced the DMZ, for it is largely off-limits to civilians on both sides.” His chapter doesn’t just analyze imagination. It practices it—through photography, emotion, and sustained attention to detail. “Aesthetics,” he argues, “is about the ability to step back, reflect, and see strategic dilemmas and policies in a new way.”

That kind of seeing—stepping back, reflecting, noticing what’s been excluded—is not decoration. It’s discipline. And in a time of fractured trust and accelerating complexity, it may be the strategist’s last, best tool.

Andrew Carr’s essay on authorship as a medium of imagination is among the most revealing. “Literary cultures have the ability not only to see the world but also, through this technology, the opportunity to see the world afresh.” Brendan Sargeant understood this. His essays weren’t performances of authority—they were invitations to perceive. “To write is to learn about the world,” Carr adds. In a world addicted to performance, Brendan practiced reflection.

Later in the chapter, Carr describes Sargeant’s “strategic instincts” as “an attempt at grappling with the world rather than dictating to it.” The implication is profound as the value of imagination lies not in elegance—but in effect. If it doesn’t move the world, it’s not imagination. It’s fantasy.

Amy King returns us to one of Brendan’s most urgent questions—“What would other perspectives reveal?” His work in institutional reform and gender equity wasn’t peripheral—it was central. It reflected his strategic ethic. “It’s all micro,” he used to say. The shape of a nation’s future is nested in the details it chooses to see.

Hugh White called Sargeant “the imaginative bureaucrat” and outlined four acts of strategic imagination—foresight, risk realism, policy adaptability, and identity redefinition. “Those who lack the capacity to imagine catastrophe,” he wrote, “lack the capacity to avoid it.”

Jochen Prantl reframes national strategy with a question that echoes Sargeant’s legacy… “What is the policy space that Australia ought to imagine and occupy to fully realize its national identity?” His point is clear, institutions that cannot imagine beyond precedent cannot protect the future they claim to defend.

While reading Strategic Imagination, I often thought of Andrew Marshall. 

Although Marshall died in 2019, his influence continues—much like Brendan’s. I was introduced to his work this past year while studying at RAND and found him immediately compelling. Marshall, the founding director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, wasn’t known for predicting the future—but for giving the U.S. military a disciplined way to imagine it. His legacy, captured in The Last Warrior and Remembering Andy Marshall, is marked by a belief in asymmetry, long-term thinking, and cultural perception as tools of survival. He was not loud, not linear, and never rushed.

Neither was Brendan Sargeant.

Both men operated at the margins of traditional power, and yet both helped shape the strategic futures their nations now inhabit. Both knew that bureaucracies calcify around comfort. And both believed that imagination—strategic, moral, cultural—was the only antidote to drift.

Sargeant, like Marshall, asked what was missing. Not just in analysis, but in attention. In tone. In soul. Marshall might have asked, “What would surprise us in 20 years?” Sargeant’s question was more interior, “What are we unwilling to see right now?”

Both are strategy.

If Andy Marshall gave the Pentagon a logic for thinking in decades, Brendan Sargeant gave Australia a language for remembering that strategy is human work. Both men remind us that enduring strategy must be felt, not just forecasted.

Sargeant’s imagination wasn’t just conceptual. It was relational. He understood that no strategy—no matter how brilliant—can take root in isolation. Strategy happens between people, not above them. That’s why so much of this book returns to how he made others feel.

The last chapter belongs to Brendan himself. His 2016 keynote, To See What Is Worth Seeing, ends the book like a quiet thunderclap. Quoting Murnane’s The Plains, he asks whether our strategies are real—or merely “reflections of what we are and what we are comfortable with being.”

He challenges institutions to stop seeking safety in familiarity. He dares us to see the strategic terrain not as a map, but as a mirror.

“Listen to the quiet voice,” he says.

And then comes the question—unresolved, essential, and final...

“Is our imagination strong enough to disrupt and break the forms that shape and bound it?”

Reading Strategic Imagination was more than educational. It was enlightening and inspiring. I was not only introduced to the concept of strategic imagination, I was given the quiet gift of seeing Brendan Sargeant. For who he was, and for the challenge he left us—to become who we need to be.

Chad Williamson is a military veteran and is currently pursuing his graduate degree in national security policy. He lives on Capitol Hill with his wife, Dr. Heather Williamson, and their two chocolate labs, Demmi and Ferg.