Publications

The U.S. national security community has, in recent years, begun to focus its attention on the need to compete with China and Russia. The move to embrace the reality of great power competition, and with it the prospect of great power war, comes after a three-decade respite from serious thinking about what it means to face an economically powerful and technologically sophisticated adversary in peace and in war. How can our governmental organizations, our defense planning premises and priorities, and the linkages among diverse elements of national power be revamped to focus our collective energies on a more demanding set of security challenges than has been the case since the end of the Cold War?

On February 11, 2020, CSBA President and CEO Dr. Thomas G. Mahnken testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Armed Services (HASC).  Dr. Mahnken was invited to appear before the HASC to deliver his observations on current Defense Department (DoD) priorities, the National Defense Strategy Commission, and the investments and other requirements to enable the United States to succeed in the current era of Great Power competition.

The 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) calls for increasing the capacity, lethality, and survivability of the joint force in future contested threat environments. CSBA’s report recommends five priorities for the USAF’s combat air force (CAF) that support these objectives.

Stealing a March: Chinese Hybrid Warfare in the Indo-Pacific: Issues and Options for Allied Defense Planners examines Beijing’s hybrid warfare campaigns, their origins, means and modes, level of success and possible future shape. It also assesses the primary options for U.S. and allied counter-strategy.

Winning Without Fighting: Chinese and Russian Political Warfare Campaigns and How the West Can Prevail assesses the role of political warfare in Chinese and Russian strategy. The report goes beyond diagnosing the challenge to offer a range of potential allied counter-strategies and proposes a new conceptual approach to such thinking.

Dr. Thomas G. Mahnken testified before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in a hearing on “A ‘World-Class' Military: Assessing China’s Global Military Ambitions” on June 20, 2019.