Dr. Mahnken will also moderate a Q&A session with attendees. The session will conclude at 3:00 PM EDT.
To attend, please click the registration link below. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar. We look forward to seeing you on the 27th.
]]>CSBA hosted a virtual roundtable with Commissioners Hon. Robert O. Work and Dr. Jose-Marie Griffiths on Monday, April 19, 2021. The session focused on several chapters of the report, featuring Commissioners Work and Griffiths in conversation with CSBA Senior Fellows Dr. Chris Bassler and Dr. Harrison Schramm. Following the discussion, there was a Q&A session with attendees.
Dr. Jose-Marie Griffiths
Hon. Robert O. Work
]]>
The discussion will be moderated by CSBA’s Director of Research and Studies, Evan Braden Montgomery (also an author in the collection), and will include remarks by:
Please register for the event at the link below. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.
We look forward to seeing you at what promises to be an insightful and engaging discussion.
]]>
Increasingly, the focus of U.S. defense planners is being drawn to developments and military capabilities in the Indo-Pacific region. On Monday, March 15, 2021 Major General Richard Coffman, USA, Director of the Army Futures Command's Next-Generation Combat Vehicle (NGCV) Cross-Functional Team, will join CSBA for a remote discussion of the role new armor systems could play in that region. Coffman will also provide an update on development efforts for several NGCV vehicles and how the Army is using innovative measures to drive artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous systems into its procurement process.
MG Richard “Ross” Coffman is serving as Director of the NGCV CFT located at the Detroit Arsenal in Warren, MI. His company grade years were spent with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, 2nd Cavalry Regiment, and the NTC Operations Group. He served as a field grade officer in the Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATF-S), the 1st Armored Division, the National Training Center, and twice with the 3rd Infantry Division. Prior to his current assignment, MG Ross served as the Deputy Commanding General for Maneuver in the 1st Infantry Division with duty in Eastern Europe. His civilian education includes a Bachelor degree from Centre College, an MBA from Embry Riddle University, and a Graduate Fellowship at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Dr. Chris Bassler, CSBA Senior Fellow, will moderate the discussion, which will begin at 2:00 PM EDT via Zoom. Please register below to attend this important look into how the Army is aligned with contemporary and emerging operational defense concepts.
Register in advance for this webinar.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.
]]>China’s military is going global. In the coming decade, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could be well-positioned to influence events and conduct a wide range of missions, including limited warfighting, beyond the Western Pacific. The United States and its close allies, who have enjoyed largely unobstructed access to the world’s oceans for the last three decades, will need to adjust to new military realities as the PLA makes its presence felt in faraway theaters.
In this study, Senior Fellow Toshi Yoshihara and Research Fellow Jack Bianchi argue that a deep study of China’s weaknesses as they relate to its worldwide ambitions is required to formulate an effective allied response. These weaknesses offer insights into the costs that Beijing will have to pay to go global. Importantly, the United States and its close allies enjoy agency over certain Chinese weaknesses, furnishing them leverage that, if exercised, could yield strategic dividends. The report concludes with a range of allied options that exploit China’s weaknesses to constrain and complicate the PLA’s global expansion.
Download the new report and register to join us for a webinar on January 21 for the discussion
To arrange for an interview with the study’s authors, contact William Bodie at bodie@csbaonline.org.
]]>Join us on December 1 as CSBA President and CEO Dr. Thomas G. Mahnken will discuss CSBA’s latest report, Selective Disclosure: A Strategic Approach to Long-Term Competition, with commentary from Christian Brose, Head of Strategy at Anduril Industries, and Dr. Jacquelyn Schneider of the Hoover Institution.
In Selective Disclosure, Dr. Mahnken argues that although the concept of Great Power Competition has been adopted as a central U.S. defense planning template, the Pentagon has yet to fully adapt its own processes and priorities to maximize U.S. advantages in this environment. As the United States invests in new defense technologies and concepts, policymakers should carefully consider which ones to withhold from public view during development, as well as which ones may be usefully revealed. Such “selective disclosure” can have a positive strategic effect, such as provoking competitors to expend resources on defensive countermeasures based upon an incomplete grasp of a perceived capability.
Dr. Mahnken outlines a new framework for revealing or concealing information for strategic effect in the contemporary strategic landscape. Drawing upon historical case studies, he illustrates three separate models for disclosing defense capabilities and considers the benefits and drawbacks of each approach. Finally, Mahnken proposes a series of criteria for applying selective disclosure in a period of rapid application of new defense technologies and concepts.
Download the new report and register to join us for a Webinar on December 1 for the discussion with Dr. Mahnken, moderated by Evan B. Montgomery, Director of Research and Studies at CSBA and with Discussants Christian Brose and Jacquelyn Schneider.
To arrange for an interview, contact William Bodie at bodie@csbaonline.org.
]]>Given the rapid pace of change in Asia during the last 20 years, assessing China’s longer-term trajectory represents a huge challenge for allied security planners. Despite the geostrategic disruptions of the 21st century thus far, Western policymakers continue to rely upon the same periodic defense assessment principles that were practiced during the relatively stable Cold War period. The policies that result must frequently be revised, often at great cost, in the face of frequent economic, political, and technological upheavals in Asia.
In the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments’ latest report, Which Way the Dragon?, CSBA Non-Resident Senior Fellow Dr. Ross Babbage, a former senior defense planner for the Australian government, and several noted regional scholars argue for an innovative, scenario-based approach to China’s future and Western security planning in the Indo-Pacific. The authors assess current conditions in the world’s most dynamic region and outline several alternative future scenarios to serve as strategic guideposts over the next 15 years. Each outcome identifies leading indicators to help identify promptly which future path China is taking and facilitate adroit adjustments to planning and investments. The end result reduces the uncertainties facing policymakers in real time, offering a better way to confront the challenges facing the Western allies and their partners.
According to CSBA President and CEO Dr. Thomas G. Mahnken, “Ross Babbage is one of the world’s foremost experts on China’s strategy, with numerous works pioneering the study of hybrid warfare, information operations, and other emerging forms of strategic competition. In Which Way the Dragon?, Dr. Babbage and a world class team of scholars offer real-world enhancements to our thinking about defense planning in a period of heightened tension and uncertainty in the Indo-Pacific.”
Download full “Which Way the Dragon? Sharpening Allied Perceptions of China’s Strategic Trajectory” report.
Read the full publication “Which Way the Dragon? Sharpening Allied Perceptions of China’s Strategic Trajectory” report using our online e-reader tool.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seeks to shape the external environment to its liking through several means, ranging from coercive uses of military power to economic statecraft to influence operations. Beijing’s global campaign to influence perceptions and policies abroad, in particular, has drawn media attention and, increasingly, government scrutiny. In Europe, the CCP has opened a broad political front that could have implications for the region’s long-term policies toward China and for transatlantic relations. There is thus a growing need for policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic to better understand the goals, strategies, and methods of the actors that promote CCP influence in Europe.
In this study, Senior Fellow Toshi Yoshihara and Research Fellow Jack Bianchi examine how some European civic organizations, established ostensibly to foster ties with China, have helped to enhance the CCP’s power. Drawing from Chinese-language sources, the report assesses how “friendship groups” in Europe—and the coopted European political and business elites that lead them—serve as mouthpieces and intermediaries for advancing Beijing’s domestic priorities and foreign policy goals. Yoshihara and Bianchi conclude that European authorities and civil society are in a good position to implement measured approaches and policies to better understand, monitor, and push back against unwelcome aspects of Beijing’s influence campaign.
Download full “Uncovering China’s Influence in Europe: How Friendship Groups Coopt European Elites” report.
Read the full publication “Uncovering China’s Influence in Europe: How Friendship Groups Coopt European Elites” report using our online e-reader tool.
The U.S. national security community has, in recent years, begun to focus its attention on the need to compete with China and Russia. The move to embrace the reality of great power competition, and with it the prospect of great power war, comes after a three-decade respite from serious thinking about what it means to face an economically powerful and technologically sophisticated adversary in peace and in war. How can our governmental organizations, our defense planning premises and priorities, and the linkages among diverse elements of national power be revamped to focus our collective energies on a more demanding set of security challenges than has been the case since the end of the Cold War? Are there lessons that can be applied from the past 30 years – the era of “unipolarity,” the first Gulf War, and the post-9/11 conflicts? Our should we cast our mental template further back to identify useful policy antecedents, such as the period in which the United States organized for and adapted to long-term competition with the Soviet Union?
Thomas G. Mahnken, CSBA President and CEO and a member of the independent National Defense Strategy Commission, explores these and other questions in Forging the Tools of 21st Century Great Power Competition. Dr. Mahnken reviews our current national tools to compete and, if necessary, wage war in the future, looking back on decades of U.S.-Soviet rivalry to determine whether that very different experience can still shed light on current conditions. Chapters include assessments of alliance management, defense policy, arms control and competition, economic relations, political warfare and internal security. Also included is an appendix surveying past “whole-of-government” efforts to compete with the Soviet Union and resulting insights on the effectiveness of various instruments of power during the Cold War.
Over the past decade, the Chinese navy overtook Japan’s maritime service in critical measures of power, including fleet size, aggregate tonnage, and firepower. China eclipsing Japan in naval power could introduce unwelcome strategic trends. It may well fuel an even more intense competition between Tokyo and Beijing, two seafaring rivals that already regard each other with deep suspicion. Japan’s displacement at sea could increase the probability of deterrence failure in the next crisis. It threatens to undercut U.S. confidence in Japan’s capacity to fulfill its allied responsibilities, sowing acrimony within the security partnership.
In Dragon Against the Sun: Chinese Views of Japanese Seapower, Senior Fellow Toshi Yoshihara assesses how Chinese strategists perceive the shift in the Sino-Japanese naval balance. The study finds that Beijing anticipates an intensifying naval rivalry with Tokyo in the coming years. The report further finds that the prospects of naval superiority will persuade Chinese statesmen and commanders to adopt an offensive strategy in a local maritime conflict against Japan. Yoshihara shows that the local naval imbalance, if left unaddressed, will strain the U.S.-Japan alliance and destabilize Asia. The study urges Washington and Tokyo to recognize the Chinese challenge, act swiftly, and restore the naval balance.
The Office of Net Assessment (ONA) has been one of the most effective and innovative centers for strategic thinking in the Department of Defense since 1973. Under the leadership of the legendary Andrew W. Marshall (who contributed an introduction to this volume), net assessments utilize a multidisciplinary approach to defense analysis to capture the dynamics of national or coalition military strengths and weaknesses for comparison with the capabilities of competitors and adversaries. They offer critical insights to senior leaders on the relative military power of the United States vis-à-vis potential adversaries over time.
The panel will also include:
Please register below to participate in a lively discussion about an invaluable volume for scholars and students in international relations, political science, and conflict and security. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.
]]>You are cordially invited to a CSBA virtual roundtable – sponsored by Expanse, a world leader in enterprise software and internet operations management – examining the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for the future competitive balance between the United States and China.
The discussion will be moderated by Dr. Thomas G. Mahnken, President and CEO of CSBA, and features:
The event will begin at 2:00 PM EDT on Thursday, May 28, 2020. Please register at the link below for what surely will be an important and stimulating forum. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.