“Frequently repositioning forces across a base cluster could induce an enemy to dilute its strike salvos over a larger area and possibly waste weapons on false targets,” Mark Gunzinger and Bryan Clark wrote in a May report for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a national security think thank.

Known as the Suwalki Gap, a 64-mile strip of Poland’s eastern border has become a growing focus of U.S. military planning.

While U.S. and NATO forces were free to launch attacks on al-Qaida, Islamic State and several other terrorist groups, they could only attack Taliban forces if they were directly attacking coalition forces, especially Afghan army troops, or could be directly tied to previous attacks on friendly forces. These stringent rules of engagement were meant to avoid "unintentional casualties and unwanted damage," said Mark Gunzinger, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Such attacks could "frankly, hurt your overall objective," he added, meaning to maintain open channels of communication with the Afghan government and push for diplomatic resolutions. "This is not a major air campaign," Gunzinger, a former advisor to the Air Force, told Air Force Times in late May. "It is an air support operation."..

As Mark Gunzinger and Bryan Clark argue in a recent report, defending against these threats will require non-kinetic technologies capable of defeating larger missile salvos at a far lower cost than the “hit-to-kill” system in operation today. Specifically, Gunzinger and Clark call for a mix of shorter range, lower cost, kinetic capabilities combined with “left-of-launch” technologies, such as lasers and electronic warfare countermeasures that enable defeat of a missile before it has been launched...

"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 "These assumptions are no longer valid."

While the U.S. may have superiority among all global military forces due to the sheer numbers of its military forces, weapons, jets, ships and tanks alone, one think tank is now saying the U.S. has to think harder. In today’s war, sheer number alone cannot ensure victory, not if there are guided missile systems that can take out your assets before you can even deploy them. This is one of the foremost findings by Mark Gunzinger and Bryan Clark in their latest report for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. It is not because the Pentagon is not trying hard to close the missile threat gap...