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The U.S. Navy’s Greatest Enemy Might Be Exhaustion
It will not be easy to cover for the loss of the two destroyers, explains Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
In the News
Navy orders pause in operations, safety review after USS John S. McCain collision
Top priority missions, such as ballistic missile defense due to tensions with North Korea, will likely continue despite the pause, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the non-partisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Navy veteran and former senior civilian official at the Pentagon.
In the News
Life after Congress for former Rep. Forbes hasn’t meant retirement
The new position adds to a portfolio that already includes a teaching position at Regent University in Virginia Beach and a fellowship at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I. Forbes also has joined the board of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank specializing in defense and national security.
In the News
Ten Sailors Missing After U.S. Warship Collision Near Singapore
Between 1998 and 2015, the Navy shrank by 20 percent to 271 ships, while the number of vessels deployed overseas remained at about 100 ships, Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, wrote in a 2015 article for The National Interest. Clark concluded that each ship has to work 20 percent more to meet demand.
In the News
Dealing with Reality Shock: Refocusing on The World We Have Rather Than the World We Wish We Would Have
During recent conversations with Ross Babbage in the United States and then Australia, we discussed the dynamics of change in the global environment and the challenges posed to the liberal democracies by the illiberal powers.
Analysis
Is a U.S.-Russia Reset Possible?
Since the end of World War II, virtually every president has attempted to reset U.S.-Russia relations. Harry S. Truman confided in his diary that he was tired of “babying” the Soviets when they didn’t carry out the obligations they had undertaken at Yalta. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Spirit of Geneva” sought to make a new start with Stalin’s successors. John F. Kennedy sought to recalibrate relations with his disastrous Vienna summit, in June 1961, which paved the way for the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Richard Nixon sought détente with the increasingly sclerotic Brezhnevite leadership. Jimmy Carter also tried to change the terms of U.S.-Soviet relations early in his term, as did Ronald Reagan, who famously proposed a new strategy—“We win, they lose.” Some of these resets were based on the need to get tougher with Russia and some were based on a desire to find common ground. But after the Cold War, all of the efforts went unrequited. The specific irritants in each case were different, but at the end of the day, all of them failed because the Russian reform project faltered in the late 1990s. As a result, rather than joining the liberal international order, Russia became a revisionist state whose fundamental orientation limited the scope for successful engagement with Moscow. That is why Trump’s reset will almost certainly fail—and a good thing, too, since accommodating Moscow’s current demands would almost certainly mean sacrificing traditional U.S. interests.