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Editor David Craig sits down with Mark Gunzinger and Bryan Clark, Senior Fellows at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, to discuss CSBA's new report 'Winning The Salvo Competition: Rebalancing America’s Air And Missile Defenses,' which "includes a discussion of initiatives that could improve our nation’s ability to counter guided weapon salvos that threaten its future ability to project power." The report also "examines the emerging dynamic between militaries that have PGMs and capabilities to counter precision strikes in order to assess promising operational concepts and capabilities for air and missile defense." China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea already possess such weapons, and any assessment of the future threat environment will need to take these systems into account.

Editor David Craig sits down with Mark Gunzinger and Bryan Clark, Senior Fellows at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, to discuss CSBA's new report 'Winning The Salvo Competition: Rebalancing America’s Air And Missile Defenses,' which "includes a discussion of initiatives that could improve our nation’s ability to counter guided weapon salvos that threaten its future ability to project power." The report also "examines the emerging dynamic between militaries that have PGMs and capabilities to counter precision strikes in order to assess promising operational concepts and capabilities for air and missile defense." China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea already possess such weapons, and any assessment of the future threat environment will need to take these systems into account.

Christopher Sims’ “Academics in Foxholes: The Life and Death of the Human Terrain System” contributes to the ongoing debate about the U.S. military’s performance in Iraq and Afghanistan and, more specifically, the relationship between the U.S. government and the academy. As the authors point out, there is much that both scholars and practitioners can learn from the successes and failures of the Human Terrain System (HTS), which brought together civilian academics and military personnel. Even more broadly, however, the experience reveals much about the relationship between the U.S. armed forces (primarily the army) on the one hand and academic social scientists (primarily anthropologists and sociologists) on the other.

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.

The great Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, counseled, “Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” At its core, this means placing your enemy in such a disadvantageous position that he comes to believe it is useless to resist. In modern military parlance this is known as achieving decisive “positional advantage.”

Rep. Mac Thornberry’s proposed acquisition reform bill is a bold and innovative attempt to solve two major problems with how the Department of Defense plans for and buys major weapons systems. (Thornberry introduces a prototype bill for committee discussion later today. The Editor)