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U.S. Marine Corps plans to land F-35B Joint Strike Fighters and MV-22 Osprey tiltrotors for dispersed vertical-insertion operations within enemy target areas could counter strategies to strike U.S. forces with missile salvos, says Mark Gunzinger, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA).

In a report out this morning, CSBA scholars Bryan Clark and Mark Gunzinger argue that we don’t just need new technology and new tactics to confront the growing missile threats from China and Russia, though lasers, railguns, and hypervelocity projectiles are all useful. We need a different missile defense mindset than what we have today, one that trusts computers to shoot down incoming weapons at literally the last minute...

“I think everybody saw the Senate bill, and they said ‘Whoa,’” Katherine Blakeley, a fellow with Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, told Bloomberg BNA. “It would be a very big change.”…House Armed Services Committee (HASC) Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) agrees, Blakeley said. “I don't think he is sold on these proposed management changes,” she said.

Jesse Sloman, research assistant at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA, fear that marine aviation is at risk of slowly breaking under the load. “The Marine Corps is most likely to experience critical gaps in the future in aviation readiness and modernization,” he warns. “Two of the Corps’ most important new platforms, the F-35 and the CH-53K, have suffered from cost overruns and delays sufficient to force the Corps to fly some of its legacy platforms (the F/A-18, AV-8, and CH-53) far longer than intended.”

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.