To date, however, the US has avoided such direct challenges. Indeed, argued Bryan Clark of the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments, the American approach has been remarkably indirect. “The US can be seen as playing a ‘long game’ in which it improves relations with and its military posture in countries on China’s Southeast Asian periphery and to reduce China’s influence, while in the near term giving in on China’s efforts in the South China Sea proper,” Clark said in an email (emphasis added). What has this tack achieved since the last Shangri-La? The Philippines has hosted Air Force A-10 attack planes. Singapore is hosting Navy P-8 patrol aircraft. Vietnam agreed to host a US Army stockpile of humanitarian supplies, and the US lifted restrictions on arms sales to Hanoi. All this “goes along with this idea of not contesting the South China Sea islands directly, but instead building more lasting relations and military posture along the periphery,” Clark said. “If properly equipped, forces in Vietnam and the Philippines could hold China’s island facilities at risk and negate some of the advantage they provide China.” “That may work,” Clark continued, “but only if the increasing Chinese militarization of the South China Sea does not in the end convince its neighbors that the US will not be able to support them militarily….. Eventually, the U.S. will have to contest China’s effort to make the South China Sea a ‘Chinese lake.'”

As Mark Gunzinger and Bryan Clark argue in a recent report, defending against these threats will require non-kinetic technologies capable of defeating larger missile salvos at a far lower cost than the “hit-to-kill” system in operation today. Specifically, Gunzinger and Clark call for a mix of shorter range, lower cost, kinetic capabilities combined with “left-of-launch” technologies, such as lasers and electronic warfare countermeasures that enable defeat of a missile before it has been launched...

Seapower chairman Forbes made the point even more directly in a memo sent to his colleagues before the hearing: “According to one of the best independent naval analysts (Bryan Clark of the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments), the Navy is ‘facing a fundamental choice: maintain current levels of forward presence and risk breaking the force or reduce presence and restore readiness.’ I believe Congress must pursue a third option: to increase funding for the Navy to levels that will enable it to do what our nation asks without running its ships and sailors ragged or sending them into battle unprepared.”

"Since the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon had the luxury of assuming that air and missile attacks on its bases and forces would either not occur or would be within the capacity of the limited defenses it has fielded," analysts Mark Gunzinger and Bryan Clark wrote for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an influential defense policy think tank. "These assumptions are no longer valid."

While the U.S. may have superiority among all global military forces due to the sheer numbers of its military forces, weapons, jets, ships and tanks alone, one think tank is now saying the U.S. has to think harder. In today’s war, sheer number alone cannot ensure victory, not if there are guided missile systems that can take out your assets before you can even deploy them. This is one of the foremost findings by Mark Gunzinger and Bryan Clark in their latest report for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. It is not because the Pentagon is not trying hard to close the missile threat gap...

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.