“Since the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon had the luxury of assuming that air and missile attacks on its bases and forces would either not occur or would be within the capacity of the limited defenses it has fielded,” analysts Mark Gunzinger and Bryan Clark wrote for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an influential defense policy think tank. “These assumptions are no longer valid.”

U.S. Marine Corps plans to land F-35B Joint Strike Fighters and MV-22 Osprey tiltrotors for dispersed vertical-insertion operations within enemy target areas could counter strategies to strike U.S. forces with missile salvos, says Mark Gunzinger, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA).

In a report out this morning, CSBA scholars Bryan Clark and Mark Gunzinger argue that we don’t just need new technology and new tactics to confront the growing missile threats from China and Russia, though lasers, railguns, and hypervelocity projectiles are all useful. We need a different missile defense mindset than what we have today, one that trusts computers to shoot down incoming weapons at literally the last minute...

Over the last 15 years, the Department of Defense spent more than $24 billion to procure a mix of surface-to-air interceptors that lacks the capacity to defeat large salvos of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and other guided weapons that America’s adversaries are now capable of launching. As a result, enemy precision strikes in future conflicts could overwhelm the U.S. military’s air and missile defenses. In peacetime, an inadequate air and missile defense architecture will reduce the credibility of American assurances to its allies and its ability to deter aggressors.

US military experts have warned that the Baltic Sea has become increasingly unsafe for the American military forces there because of the military encounters with Russia.

"Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military has never really had to fight an enemy that had its own arsenal of precision-guided weapons," said Mark Gunzinger, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.