CSBA's newest release, Defense Planning for the Long Haul: Scenarios, Operational Concepts, and the Future Security Environment, translates the principal strategic challenges the United States is likely to confront – radical extremism, the rise of China, and the wider proliferation of nuclear weapons — into a set of plausible scenarios:
- An irregular war in Nigeria between the government and an insurgent movement;
- An attempt by China to reunify Taiwan using military coercion; and
- The acquisition by Iran of a small number of nuclear weapons.
“Military organizations often find themselves ill equipped and underprepared for the threats they are asked to confront,” notes the author, Evan Montgomery. “Avoiding this dilemma is arguably more difficult today than it was in the past, due to the variety of challenges the Department of Defense must be ready to meet—from transnational terrorist groups, to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the rise of new major powers.”
The report comes just weeks in advance of the Defense Department’s submission of the Quadrennial Defense Review to Congress in early February. These scenarios highlight operational problems the US military could face in a wide range of contingencies such as the growing difficulty of projecting power, operating under a nuclear shadow, and bolstering fragile states. “This paper is an important contribution to public debate regarding our future defense posture,” adds Andrew Krepinevich, CSBA’s President. “Scenario-based planning of the kind presented in here has shown itself to be an effective tool through which to evaluate the suitability of the force structure, operational concepts and defense program emerging from the QDR.”