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America Can’t Win Great-Power Hardball
Liberal advocates of a multilateralist, rules-based, post-sovereign foreign policy have recently been having their noses ground in the grim fact of great power rivalry. Robert Kagan first called attention to renascent great-power politics a decade ago in "End of Dreams, Return of History," with its blunt opening line, "The world has become normal again." In the last few years, the realists - including Henry Kissinger in his 2014 book, "World Order," Hal Brands, and Foreign Policy's own Stephen M. Walt - have had a field day at the expense of idealists who, they said, had persuaded themselves that the end of history had arrived.
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21st Century Peace from Aging Populations, Debt, Pension and Medical Costs
2013 projections, from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, show that given historical trends of cost growth in personnel spending and O&M, those two items will consume 86 percent of the allowed DoD budget by 2021.
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Marines Seek Anti-Ship HIMARS: High Cost, Hard Mission
Would an 80-mile missile be useful? Absolutely, said Bryan Clark, a retired Navy commander now with the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments. “The 80 (nautical mile) minimum range could be relevant in scenarios in the Persian Gulf, Mediterranean, and possibly the South China Sea,” all relatively narrow waterways, he said. “That would be enough to threaten ships beyond realistic ranges for enemy helicopters and assault craft to attack the EAB (in retaliation).”
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Ambition Meets Reality for Global Britain
“Grand strategy” is not a term that appears in the United Kingdom’s foreign policy lexicon often. The last Labour government and both Conservative-led administrations have preferred instead to outline “national security strategies.” In some quarters, grand strategy is seen as “hubristic” and “associated with empire.” It certainly does not have to be so and the latter claim rests, to some extent, on a misreading of history. All states conduct grand strategy – whether they choose to acknowledge it or not – and to varying degrees of success. Channelling Trotsky, Hal Brands wryly observed, “You may not be interested in grand strategy but grand strategy is interested in you.”
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Study: Funding Levels for Navy Shipboard Training Remained Flat for Decades
Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, disagrees with the CSIS findings about flat funding for training. The current budget request for Fiscal Year 2018, Clark said, increases training funding to $977 million, or roughly $3.5 million per ship.
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Experts: Don’t Expect Closer U.S.-Russian Ties Anytime Soon
Eric Edelman of the Miller Center moderated Friday’s panel discussion, “The Putin Challenge.” The panelists included Derek Chollet of the German Marshall Fund of the United States; Allen Lynch, a professor in UVA’s Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics; Hal Brands, the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies; and Eugene Rumer, senior fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at Washington, D.C.’s National Defense University.