Fighting right up to the line that would clearly trigger a Western response is known as “grey zone conflict,” says Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense think tank that has run several war games with Eastern European nations. “They’re doing a very good job of playing at the edges,” he says of the Russians. Because an obvious U.S. military response may not be considered desirable in such circumstances, there is a premium now on developing U.S. systems that can ght as surreptitiously as Russia does, by disrupting their military command and control with electronic warfare and cyberattacks, Clark says…So the Pentagon is investing more in ground-based missile systems with names such as the Long Range Precision Fires and the Multi-Mission Launcher that are not as easily detected as aircraft and can get closer to enemy targets, Clark says. The propensity of Putin to fight right up to the line that could trigger U.S. military involvement and the way Russia’s long- range air defenses are keeping U.S. forces at bay “are the two big military challenges the U.S. is just now coming to grips with,” Clark says.

Mark Gunzinger is Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments…and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Forces Transformation and Resources. He and his colleague at CSBA, former Special Assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations Bryan Clark, have released “Winning the Salvo Competition: Rebalancing America’s Air and Missile Defenses” to serve as a how-to guide for reshaping missile defense policy and capability. Gunzinger discussed their work on National Defense Week.

“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 “These assumptions are no longer valid.”

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...

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.