Publications

Secretary Hagel recently made waves in Army circles by suggesting that the Army leverage its missile forces to resume the old mission of coastal defense. In this brief, CSBA Research Fellow Eric Lindsey argues that Army missiles forces can do far more than defend coastlines.

With the United States now engaged in military operations against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), there are many questions regarding the cost, duration, and scope of these operations. This CSBA Backgrounder provides a range of estimates for the cost of military operations against ISIL to date and how much these operations may cost over the coming months.

This backgrounder discusses the balance the FY15 defense budget attempts to find among compensation, force structure, modernization, and readiness, and compare the choices made in this budget to the Joint Think Tank exercise CSBA hosted with three other think tanks in early February 2014.

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.

Proposals to significantly reduce or even abolish nuclear weapons are as old as nuclear weapons themselves. Over the past several years, however, they have gained considerable momentum and moved squarely into the mainstream of policy analysis and political debate.

As attention now turns to the FY 2014 budget and the Administration’s much-delayed budget request, the fundamental issues that led to uncertainty and delays in the FY 2013 budget remain unresolved.