CSBA in the News

[Michael] Vickers has seen about as much covert action as Jack Bauer from Fox’s hit show 24. But Vickers has also been able to do something Bauer’s anti-authority streak never quite allowed to happen: Rise to the highest levels of the U.S. counterterrorism leadership structure. 

The United States is on the cusp of a major debate in both political parties over the country’s role in the world, but so far the presidential candidates have not made clear their own priorities in a time when defense spending is unlikely to grow, a panel of national security experts agreed Tuesday. Jim Thomas, a distinguished senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, said today at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that “there’s always going to be hard limits as to how far [an incoming president] can go” in changing national security strategy – debt payments, rising entitlement costs, treaty constraints, a balky Congress and evolving international challenges.

The mismatch between resources and commitments will require “unbelievably hard choices,” said Jim Thomas, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “We're coming up on some really big, fundamental questions and I don't think that either candidate so far has even begun to address them,” he said.

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said that the Naval Integrated Fire Control Counter-Air (NIFC-CA) will be the key for the Navy’s carrier-based air operations in the post-2030 environment. One option is “using F-35Cs or Bs as stealthy ISR platforms that passively find targets, which are communicated using secure datalinks to F/A-18 E/F ‘missile trucks’ located at standoff range from threat air defenses or aircraft,” Clark said.

Bryan Clark, formerly a top aide to the Chief of Naval Operations, was more optimistic. “While SOSUS did suffer from lack of attention in the 1990s, it has been reinvigorated and is now part of an Integrated Undersea Surveillance System (IUSS) that includes other arrays and the SURTASS surveillance ships,” he told me.