Publications

The hijacking of the 17,000 ton container ship Maersk Alabama off the Indian Ocean coast of Somalia on April 8th, 2009 was the first occasion when a US-flagged ship with a US crew had been captured by Somali pirates. If this had been an ordinary ship the expectation would have been that the ship and its crew would have been held for months beyond hope of rescue or retaliation waiting for a substantial ransom to be paid. Thanks to the effort that Maersk Lines had put into planning for such an eventuality, the courage and determination of the American crew in recapturing their ship, and the accuracy of the sharpshooters firing from the moving deck of the USS Bainbridge who killed three of the pirates holding the ship’s captain, Richard Phillips, in a lifeboat, this was not an ordinary hijacking.  Instead, it was one of the shortest ever recorded.

For more than a decade, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) has closely followed emerging technologies that, integrated with new operational concepts and organizational structures, offer the potential to  fundamentally change how advanced militaries fight. Such changes in the conduct of war constitute what has come to be called a “revolution in military affairs,” or RMA. The German military’s development of Blitzkrieg in the years between the two World Wars (1918-1939) constitutes one of the more familiar examples of an RMA. Visionary officers integrated tanks, radio communications, and tactical aircraft with opportunistic deep-penetration tactics and the flexible, combined arms structure of the Panzer division in ways that still influence how we conduct combined- arms warfare.

Since the end of the Cold War, the US Navy, US Marine Corps, and US Coast Guard have been in search of a new maritime strategy—a new naval Holy Grail. The first grail, revealed in 1890 in the form of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Seapower on History, guided the Sea Services through the end of the Second World War. Mahan’s views on sea control and his emphasis on a concentrated battle fleet were genetically encoded into generations of officers during two decades of wargaming at the Naval War College between the two world wars. Soon after World War II, however, the grail was lost during a turbulent period when America faced no real maritime challenger.

Aircraft carriers are one of America’s key power-projection systems. To ensure their continued operational effectiveness and survivability in the future security environment, they need to be equipped with new air platforms with greater range (independent reach), greater persistence (ability to loiter over the target area), and improved stealth (ability to survive in contested airspace).

The 2002 Defense Authorization Act requires the Secretary of Defense to submit a report on the Defense Department’s efforts in counterterrorism and homeland security. The report is due to be released this month. A particular area of Congressional interest is the future use of the Reserve Component.1 Stretching back to their roots as colonial militias, America’s citizen-soldiers have historically played a key part in protecting the homeland. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, many expect the role of the Reserves to be greatly expanded. Several major studies have already called for homeland security to become the Reserve Component’s primary mission.2 Will the Department of Defense heed their call? The department is not approaching the issue with a blank sheet of paper. The 1999 Reserve Component Employment 2005 Study (RCE-05), the Defense Department’s most detailed, wide-ranging analysis of the Reserves’ potential contributions to homeland security, reveals what has been done so far and why the prospects for further change are not bright.