News

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.

The US military "has become accustomed to assuming" its opponents either can't strike US bases and forces overseas with precision, or don't have the capacity to overwhelm US defenses, but "neither of these assumptions are correct today," Mark Gunzinger, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said Friday.

Preparing for future salvo competitions will require a "system of systems" approach, Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said Friday in Washington, D.C. "There is no one silver bullet that is going to solve the missile defense challenge" the US is facing, Clark said. Defeating large precision-guided missile salvos will require kinetic defenses, non-kinetic defenses, and battle management systems, Clark and co-author Mark Gunzinger said in a report called, "Winning the Salvo Competition: Rebalancing America's Air and Missile Defenses."

The U.S. Navy could save money by shifting its missile-salvo defensive anti-air warfare (AAW) strategy away from long-range interceptors and toward medium-range surface-to-air interceptors, hypervelocity projectiles, directed energy weapons and electronic warfare systems, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA).

Given the low radar cross section and the ship’s ability to operate close to shore, Zumwalt could conceivably be a credible special operations insertion platform like how the service uses its guided missile and attack submarines, Bryan Clark, a naval analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and former aide to retired Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert, told USNI News last week. “Originally because the class had this focus on the littoral, it seems like there was always some expectation that they may do special ops off the ship. It’s always been focused on littoral environments and some of those things were baked in at the beginning,” Clark said. The additional features the Navy has added over the last ten years appeared to have increased the special mission emphasis.