Men lie, strategies lie—numbers don’t

Measuring the frequency of words and themes in a document can offer insights, reveal underlying messages, and even illuminate what’s on the minds of its writers. The 2026 National Defense Strategy is meant to help align ends, ways, and means, and to signal goals and values. But to find the truth, sometimes you just have to count. 

This kind of content analysis can act like an X-ray for a document, unveiling structural DNA that the authors themselves might not realize they’ve left behind. The cold, hard math of the text itself can reveal overall priorities or even a “Say-Do” gap. For instance, if a corporate strategy has five mentions of “customers” but 50 of “shareholders,” you know who the company cares most about. 

It also tracks rhetorical inflation—i.e., whether the strategy is largely actionable or mostly fluff. A high frequency of “aspiration” words with a low frequency of “resource” words usually signals a strategy that lacks a real execution plan. Tone and context can also be indicative. As an illustration, a strategy paper heavy on defensive terminology suggests an organization playing not to lose vs one with more aggressive terms is seeking change. 

Beyond raw counts, identifying semantic networks—that is, words that appear near each other—can also reveal logic and emotional clusters. For instance, if the word “cloud” is consistently clumped near terms like “cost overrun,” the organization is likely not a fan. 

What is not said can be just as telling, as Sherlock Holmes said about the dog that didn’t bark. If a previously “vital” product line suddenly drops to zero mentions, you’ve identified a pivot or a failure that the text isn’t explicitly admitting. 

While words have power, word counts can show who has power. In documents produced by co-authors or even committees, content analysis can reveal who has the true hand in the relationship, which voice had more sway in the crafting and editing. This is especially important inside government, where the process of getting various offices and leaders to agree to a published “strategy” involves not just linguistic compromise, but also bureaucratic and even ideological battles. 

Finally, no matter how thorough, a “normal” read is subject to your cognitive biases. You tend to notice what you’re already looking for. You react based on pre-existing views of everything from the authors to the issues. But as the great rhetorician Jay-Z reminds us, “Men lie, women lie, numbers don’t.” 

Top themes

Of all its issues, themes, and topics, the new National Defense Strategy is most concerned with “allies,” who are mentioned 61 times. That’s more often, per thousand words, than the 151 mentions in the 2022 strategy issued by President Biden’s team or the 20 in the 2018 summary document issued during Trump’s first term.

More striking is the shift in tone. Just over half of the mentions of allies in the 2026 strategy appear in a demanding or derogatory context. Allies are not described this way in the 2018 or 2022 documents.

By the numbers, the national defense strategy’s second major focus is “Trump.” The president gets 52 mentions, plus his face in half of the document’s ten photos. The 2018 strategy made no mention of President Trump, and the 2022 strategy mentioned “President Biden” twice. The contrast again is not just in the number, but the tone. More than two-thirds of the mentions of “Trump” in the strategy are linked to terms of praise such as “decisively” or “courageously.” The strategy also declares, twice, that “President Trump is leading the nation into a new golden age.” 

The third-most-important topic, at 48 mentions, is American leaders who are not President Trump. There were no such mentions in the previous strategies, which were more typical ends-ways-means guides to the future. Here too, each mention is negative in tone or context: for example, the document says former leaders “neglected—even rejected—putting Americans and their concrete interests first.”

Dueling voices

Analysis of the 2026 NDS reveals two editorial voices, likely reflecting the different writers and editors behind them. 

The first voice is political-ideological. It uses rhetoric foreign to traditional military documents, such as aggressive adjectives (previous policies are “grandiose nation-building projects,” “self-congratulatory pledges,” and “rudderless war”), persona-centric language (such as crediting “President Trump” for “historic achievements”), and a decidedly populist framing (“America First” appears multiple times). 

The second voice is professional-strategic. It uses the technical and bureaucratic style of policy wonks and career military, with precise doctrinal language (“line of effort,” “denial defense,” “Joint Force,” and “operational flexibility”), and analytical and data-driven assessments (“nominal GDP” and “economic center of gravity.” 

Overall, the political-ideological voice overshadows the professional-strategic voice, especially in the introduction and conclusion, which customarily summarize a document’s overall message. 

Within these voices, word analysis indicates three major narrative themes. The first is “peace through strength,” which appears 13 times. It is hardly a novel theme; it has been espoused by Emperor Hadrian, George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and, more recently, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. But its frequency in the new NDS is a sharp increase from two mentions in 2018 and none in 2022. 

The second theme, at 11 mentions, is “burden-sharing” among allies. This theme was absent in 2018 and appeared three times in 2022, and was then only used in the sense of “nuclear burden-sharing.” 

Tied for second is “defense industrial base.” While the topic has been reported as a new focus of U.S. strategy, its frequency is statistically similar to the nine mentions it received in the 2022 document.

New words

The 2026 NDS includes several terms and focus areas that have not appeared in earlier such documents.

The most frequent is the Trump administration’s moniker for the agency that issued the document: “Department of War,” used 27 times. A department’s name can only officially be changed by Congress, so the document’s title “National Defense Strategy” is not included in that count.

In second place is “narco-terrorist,” which is an interesting reframing of a threat. “Terrorism” and “terrorist” are hardly new terms; they collectively appear 18 times in 2026, up from 14 times in 2022 and 22 times in 2018. However, two-thirds of the mentions in the new strategy take the form of “narco-terrorists,” which did not appear in either of the previous two strategies. 

A similar reframing takes place around threats within or near U.S. national territory. The new document mentions “homeland” 28 times, down from 58 in 2022. But “Western Hemisphere” and “hemispheric” get 13 mentions, up from just two in previous strategies. This regional focus is reinforced by four mentions of the “Monroe Doctrine,” which did not appear in the 2022 or 2018 documents. “Greenland” appears five times, after not being an area of discussion in either the prior Trump or Biden national defense strategy documents.

Finally, the document also includes five mentions of “warrior ethos.” It is a new term for U.S. national defense strategy documents, but notably each use talks about “restoring” it.

What’s left out

Defense analysts often focus on what’s on the page, but the real intelligence can often lie in what’s been scrubbed or reduced. 

Unsurprisingly, the new document does not mention “climate” or “diversity,” which appeared 13 and eight times, respectively, in the previous version. More striking is the absence of “Taiwan,” which was mentioned four times in 2022. 

The strategy is also mute on the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, effort, a signature (and controversial) part of the first year of the Trump Pentagon that arguably had the largest effect on the future “means” side of any discussion of U.S. defense strategy.

Perhaps most striking, though, is the absence of action items. As a parallel, when business analysts examine company strategy documents, they often chart the ratio between abstract aspiration terms (e.g., “synergy,” “seamless,” “world-class”) and concrete verbs (e.g., “procure,” “divest,” “test”). The 2026 NDS lacks any mention of force planning or the size and shape of the military, which consumed entire sections of past US defense strategies. 

Declining importance

Beyond omissions, there are also notable areas that the new strategy does not like to talk about as much as past documents. 

The most significant reduction is mentions of “China” or “PRC,” which dropped from 101 mentions in 2022 to 26 in the new document. The tone has shifted as well: four of the discussions of China emphasize a goal of being respectful towards Beijing and the rest offer reassurance that U.S. strategy’s goal simply is to deter but not threaten it. By contrast, the 2022 strategy called the Chinese military a “pacing challenge”—the phrase, which appeared 10 times, is absent from the new version—while the 2018 version was directly adversarial, using descriptors like “China is a strategic competitor using predatory economics to intimidate its neighbors while militarizing features in the South China Sea.”

“Russia” sees a similar decline in frequency—15 mentions, down from 89 in 2022—and a marked defanging of tone. Three-quarters of the 2026 mentions of Russia in the strategy downplay its threat—for example, describing it as “manageable” by Europe with less U.S. help. This is quite different from the 2022 discussion of Russia and, even more, the 2018 strategy that declared “Russia wants to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model.” Related, “Ukraine” falls from 13 mentions in 2022 to four in 2026. 

Iran and North Korea are similarly downgraded in rhetorical importance. Mentions of “Iran” fall to 13 from 33 mentions in 2022, while the nine mentions of “North Korea” and “DPRK” are down from 34 in the previous version. 

Defense technology, long a pillar of U.S. strategies, gets far shorter shrift in the new document. “Cyber” declines to six mentions, from 32 in 2022 and eight in 2018. “Bio” threats and tech, mentioned eight times in 2022 and five in 2008, go entirely unmentioned. And, while AI may have drastically taken off in the last few years, it only gets one mention in the new US National Defense Strategy, as compared to 4 in 2022 and 2 in 2018. Even “missile defense” is largely absent as a broader concept. The “Golden Dome” project is mentioned just three times, a stark contrast to the 48 times that “missile defense” appeared in 2022, bolstered by the deliberate accompanying Missile Defense Review. 

Finally, “Space” as a domain or issue of conflict shrank drastically. After being discussed six times in the 2018 document, it skyrocketed to 41 times in the 2022 document. It plummeted back to earth with just two mentions in the 2026 document, despite the creation of the Space Force being one of the more significant national defense actions of Trump’s first administration. 

Conclusion

No strategy fully survives contact with a changing world. So the raw numbers in the new document don’t directly tell us what happens next—in everything from defense budgets and military sizing to where, when, and against whom the U.S. military might be asked to use force. 

But overall word counts and their patterns do reveal something maybe more important. At least by the raw numbers, America’s official national defense strategy now has drastically changed priorities, interests, tones, narratives, and even voices. As such, it may be the most revelatory strategy ever written.