CSBA in the News

President Obama’s new military strategy is taking shape here on the sun-seared grasslands of West Texas where B-1 bomber pilots train.

It seemed a good idea at the time. But sequestration, an ugly word for an ugly thing, now threatens to rip the heart out of America’s defence budget.

There’s been a fair bit of buzz online of late over experiments with a technology called a “laser-induced plasma channel” – essentially, laser-guided, artificially generated lightning bolts – at the Army’s Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey. But, militarily, what’s it good for?

/…/With $500 billion in cuts to U.S. defense programs over 10 years set to begin on Jan. 2, industry contractors and analysts say the challenge isn’t only the amount of the cuts, it’s how they’ll be managed. They are waiting to hear if the approach in Anderson’s era will apply — the White House hasn’t said whether it’ll give the Pentagon the authority to make choices within broad categories of spending, or whether it’ll require rigid program-by-program cuts.

Boot-centric warfare (BCW) is a resilient idea. It holds that the war is not truly engaged in, let alone won, until a rifleman’s boots are on the ground.

/…/The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), a defense think tank, recently submitted its own advice to struggling policymakers, “Strategy in Austerity,” which examines two case studies of leading global powers coping with relative decline while facing a rapidly rising competitor. At the turn of the twentieth century, the British Empire was passing its peak just as Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany was rapidly ascending and asserting its strength. And in the 1970s, the United States had to deal with its failure in Southeast Asia and political and economic turmoil at home just as Soviet military power was swelling. The authors extract seven strategies policymakers in these two cases used to cope with the geostrategic challenges they faced.