CSBA in the News

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 “These assumptions are no longer valid.”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…

The US military “has become accustomed to assuming” its opponents either can't strike US bases and forces overseas with precision, or don't have the capacity to overwhelm US defenses, but “neither of these assumptions are correct today,” Mark Gunzinger, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said Friday.