CSBA in the News

The refurbished airfields also hearken back to the Cold War era, when American units were constantly rotated in and out of Europe to keep the Soviets at bay. To counter a new foe, the Air Force will continuously deploy units based in the United States and the northern Pacific to a string of airfields in Southeast Asia.

The US military services need to take advantage of the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review to carve out new, forward-looking missions or risk becoming simply smaller—and increasingly irrelevant—versions of themselves, according to Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments Senior Fellow Mark Gunzinger.

China’s military is building conventional precision-guided missiles in an effort to become Asia’s “hegemon” and force the U.S. military to operate thousands of miles from China’s coasts, according to a study made public this week.

Satellite communications are in short supply. Networks are defenseless against cyber attacks. Spacecraft cost too much. And the acquisition process is out of touch/…/

Barry Watts has a new report published by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments that traces the evolution of precision strike capabilities. Watts notes that contrary to estimates in the 1990s, “the principal fact about precision strike remains that over the last two decades the United States alone has been able to bring reconnaissance strike to bear in distant theaters around the globe.” He discusses some of the reasons for this, before warning that “there is reason to anticipate that in the years ahead at least some other nations—including China, Russia, and Iran—will endeavor to either begin catching up with or erode the U.S. lead in reconnaissance strike.” Watts also speculates that far more states and even non-state actors like Hezbollah and al-Qaeda could acquire short-range precision guided rockets, artillery, mortars and missiles (G-RAMM)/…/