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In the News

Japan, Australia Ramp Up Amphib Forces: Countering China

The Marine Corps's current Amphibious Assault Vehicle, the 1970s-vintage AAV-7. Japan will buy the US Marine Corps’s current Amphibious Assault Vehicle. Then there’s the possibly China might simply sink the ships before any Japanese troops can land. “My concern there is they’re getting too close to the flame,” said Andrew Krepinevich, former longtime president of the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments, who’s had many conversations with Japanese policymakers.

Analysis

The South China Sea Long Game

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.”

In the News

Warnings of Global Arms Race Ahead of Nuclear Security Summit

Behind the scenes, briefing papers published by intelligence agencies and think tanks, whose reports are rarely if ever mentioned in the national press or on the evening news, tell a different story, one hinted at by the decision of Russia not to send representatives to the summit. One study, published earlier this year by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, is entitled “Rethinking Armageddon: Scenario Planning in the Second Nuclear Age.”

In the News

China Defends Deployment of Anti-Ship Missiles to South China Sea Island

While in open conflict, the fixed position of the islands would make the missiles easy targets but the weapons could have a coercive effect to China’s neighbors and U.S. operations in peacetime, Bryan Clark, naval analyst Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) and former special assistant to past Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert, told USNI News on Wednesday. “In a conflict, the islands will be hard to defend, but their value is in curtailing U.S. peacetime operations and in the opening moves of a conflict when they can threaten U.S. forces with a surprise attack,” he said. “If the U.S. deployed similar forces to Palawan [in the Philippines], it could similarly impact [People‘s Liberation Army] operations.”

In the News

Will Greenville Assemble a Fighter Jet?

Mark Gunzinger, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington, D.C., think tank that focuses on defense policy, said it’s too soon to say which of the four competitors may have a leg up. It’s not yet clear, he said, whether the Air Force wants the jet for training only, or intends to also give it a combat or air defense mission, or qualify it for sale to friendly foreign governments.