Publications

On December 11, 2013, CSBA Vice President and Director of Studies Jim Thomas testified before the Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces of the House Armed Services Committee on the strategic issues tied to China’s modernization of its naval forces.

Although nuclear weapons have played a critical role in American defense strategy for more than 60 years, there is a growing debate over the number and type of nuclear forces that the United States actually needs to maintain its security and protect its allies. Over the past several years, calls for Washington to substantially reduce the size of its nuclear arsenal have become more prevalent, while the combination of declining budgets and looming recapitalization costs have made nuclear weapons a popular target for potential funding cuts. 

This report examines the state of the U.S.-Australia military alliance, detailing the geopolitical shifts currently underway in Australia’s immediate neighborhood and outlining the extent to which these developments signal the advent of a new era. The seismic nature of these changes has engendered a vigorous strategic debate within Australia over the future of its defense ties with the United States.

As the government reopened after the October 2013 shutdown, and defense got a three month reprieve before sequestration would go into effect for 2014, Todd Harrison offered his forecast at what's next for the defense budget.

Since World War II, the Department of Defense (DoD) has been able to count on America's defense industrial base (DIB) always being ready to design and produce the world-class weaponry on which the U.S. military has long relied. But the U.S. DIB is considerably smaller today than it was following the Cold War’s end. Now the Pentagon confronts a period of shrinking defense budgets at the same time the international security environment is posing new military challenges, such as the emergence of anti-access/area-denial capabilities, the growing threat to space-based systems, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The Defense Department has never had a coherent, long-term strategy for sustaining the defense industrial base's core competencies. Absent a strategy that proceeds from deciding first what to keep rather than what to cut, the possibility is growing that a day will come when the country's industrial base will no longer possess all the critical design and manufacturing capabilities that the U.S. military needs.

The proliferation of precision-strike capabilities may soon challenge the U.S. military’s ability to project power overseas and alter America’s role in the world, argues a new report published by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.