Topic: Strategy
Read the most recent CSIS research on U.S. national security strategy.
Getting to Less? The Minimal Exposure Strategy
In this brief, the authors discuss a strategy that they have labeled the Minimal Exposure Strategy. The strategy’s core premise is that the United States is largely secure from military threats due to continental U.S. geography and the deterrent quality of its nuclear and other strategic capabilities.
Getting to Less? The Progressive Values Strategy
In this brief, the authors explore a defense approach they have labeled the Progressive Values Strategy. The strategy is grounded in a view that the military instrument is not well suited to meeting many of the security challenges facing the United States. It focuses on achieving a level of military sufficiency that deters adventurism by others—as well as itself.
Getting to Less? The Innovation Superiority Strategy
In this brief, the authors discuss a strategy they have labeled the Innovation Superiority Strategy. The strategy is guided by a focus on achieving enduring American military advantage in the U.S.-China security competition.
Getting to Less? Exploring the Press for Less in America’s Defense Commitments
This CSIS Brief is the first in a series that explores the contours and implications of strategies that might reduce the U.S. military’s mission space through greater constraints on its ends, ways, or means.
Bad Idea: Calling U.S. Operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria “Endless Wars”
Politicians and everyday Americans use the term “endless wars” to describe the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Yet that generalization ignores the active effort to reduce the financial and human cost of U.S. operations while still pursuing counterinsurgency objectives.
Bad Idea? Aggressively Countering Russian Action in the Arctic
As Arctic temperatures rise and the region undergoes extreme environmental change, new economic, scientific, maritime, and political opportunities have led to the gradual militarization of the region and its potential as a new theater for strategic competition between the United States and Russia. Amid such rapid change, the strategic outlook of the Arctic over the next two decades—whether cooperative or competitive—is an open question.
Bad Ideas in National Security Podcast
In this episode of The Truth of the Matter podcast, host Andrew Schwartz welcomes Kathleen Hicks, Andrew Hunter, and Todd Harrison from the CSIS International Security Program to discuss the Bad Ideas in National Security series. In addition to analyzing their own pieces, they nominate their frontrunners for what might be considered the “worst” bad idea.
Bad Idea: Strategy That Explicitly Says What We Will Not Do
The United States’ perennial search for rigidity in strategic choice—particularly regarding what it will not do and where it will not do it—risks leaving the country vulnerable in the face of emergent challenges and shifts in American political winds.
Bad Idea: Retrenchment from U.S. Alliances
Retrenchment from forward deployed forces supporting alliances is a bad idea. Alliances, including forward-stationing of U.S. forces abroad makes the United States safer, its allies more secure, and all participating more prosperous. Any weakening of the U.S. alliance architecture should demonstrate how it provides greater benefits than the existing system.