Publications

The threat of nuclear attack by a great power or a rogue state is a major reason why every U.S. administration since the end of the Cold War has validated the need to maintain a safe, secure, and credible nuclear triad. Russia maintains a large stockpile of nuclear warheads and continues to adhere to military doctrine that indicates it might be willing to use nuclear weapons to coerce the United States and its allies in a crisis. Both Russia and China are funding multiple programs to modernize their nuclear arsenals, and the proliferation of advanced military technologies has allowed North Korea to fast-track its nuclear weapons development program.

Choosing analytic criteria for making strategic choices or judging historical outcomes is a recurring, if not universal, problem. It recurs because no general method for choosing appropriate criteria is known to exist despite the early hopes for methodological innovations ranging from macroeconomic models to operations research, systems analysis, and game theory.

President Trump’s FY 2018 defense budget promises a “historic” defense buildup. At $603 billion in the base national defense budget, some $54 billion over the Budget Control Act caps, it grows the size of military slightly and boosts RDT&E efforts, but doesn’t move the needle on procurement. Does the FY 2018 budget request build the military the U.S. needs? Will Congress succeed in funding more for defense?

Each year, the Department of Defense (DoD) submits Selected Acquisition Reports (SARs) to Congress detailing the status, plans, procurement quantities, and funding requirements for each Major Defense Acquisition Program (MDAP). These represent DoD’s largest and most expensive acquisition efforts. The most recent unclassified SARs, which were submitted in December 2016 and are consistent with the President’s FY 2018 budget request, include 87 programs, some of which extend more than 20 years into the future.

This study describes the challenges and opportunities America and its allies face in the Arctic and Antarctic and proposes new roles and missions, operational concepts, and capabilities U.S. naval and air forces should pursue to protect and further U.S. and allied national security interests in the high latitudes.

This follow-on study to the 2015 report “Winning the Airwaves: Restoring America’s Advantage in the Electromagnetic Spectrum” will describe how U.S. forces could create new options to counter “gray zone” and hybrid warfare being employed by Russia and China.