The key limitation of the traditional approaches is that theirmethodology is inappropriate for intensively investigating national power. For the intelligence community, developing a universal hierarchy of national power capabilities is an interesting effort, but one of secondary importance. The primary objective must be to assess the power capability of a few critical countries, one at a time. These countries must be investigated “intensively” in order to assess both the extent and the depth of their capabilities, and such investigations must proceed in accordance with some standardized “template” so as to enable both diachronic comparisons of progress and synoptic comparisons among a small group of peers. The conceptual underpinnings of this template are depicted in Figure 1. This graphic suggests that national power is ultimately a product of the interaction of two components: a country’s ability to dominate the cycles of economic innovation at a given point in time and, thereafter, to utilize the fruits of this domination to produce effective military capabilities that, in turn, reinforce existing economic advantages while producing a stable political order, which is maintained primarily for the country’s own strategic advantage but also provides benefits for the international system as a whole