The NSC frequently takes top-down control to send a coherent message, said Bryan Clark a former senior aide to Adm. Jon Greenert, the recently retired chief of naval operations. While serving as Greenert’s aide, Clark said the NSC regularly vetted the former CNO’s statements on China and the South China Sea.
But Bryan Clark of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments also thinks DoD needs to go further in its reforms. One of the biggest critiques of Carter’s agenda was the lack of acquisition reform. Carter said he wants to change the DAB, which provides a senior advisory role on acquisition decisions and he wants to reduce some paperwork requirements. Clark said that overlooks one of the main acquisition issues in defense, which is the development of requirements for new weapons.
The military services think they have a dilemma. A tidal wave of costly strategic nuclear modernization programs are bearing down on the defense budget over the next couple of decades, just when the services and members of Congress are anxious to take advantage of a now-rising defense budget to buy additional conventional (or, non-nuclear) military hardware.
The Marine Corps's current Amphibious Assault Vehicle, the 1970s-vintage AAV-7. Japan will buy the US Marine Corps’s current Amphibious Assault Vehicle. Then there’s the possibly China might simply sink the ships before any Japanese troops can land. “My concern there is they’re getting too close to the flame,” said Andrew Krepinevich, former longtime president of the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments, who’s had many conversations with Japanese policymakers.
The great Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, counseled, “Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” At its core, this means placing your enemy in such a disadvantageous position that he comes to believe it is useless to resist. In modern military parlance this is known as achieving decisive “positional advantage.”
Behind the scenes, briefing papers published by intelligence agencies and think tanks, whose reports are rarely if ever mentioned in the national press or on the evening news, tell a different story, one hinted at by the decision of Russia not to send representatives to the summit. One study, published earlier this year by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, is entitled “Rethinking Armageddon: Scenario Planning in the Second Nuclear Age.”
1667 K Street NW Suite 900
Washington DC, 20006
202-331-7990
info@csbaonline.org
