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A Firewalled Nuke Fund Is Bad Budgeting and Bad Planning
The military services think they have a dilemma. A tidal wave of costly strategic nuclear modernization programs are bearing down on the defense budget over the next couple of decades, just when the services and members of Congress are anxious to take advantage of a now-rising defense budget to buy additional conventional (or, non-nuclear) military hardware.
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.