Read featured commentary from CSIS experts on the latest developments in defense and national security.
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.
Critics of Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) funds point to regular base budget activities funded under OCO and its use to skirt discretionary spending limits. However, blaming OCO for our defense budget blunders, or calling for its complete elimination, punishes those who need OCO’s benefits without effectively punishing those who’ve instigated its abuse.
The revived interest in great power politics comes with an important, if oft unstated, corollary: the problem of small wars is now of secondary importance. But the U.S. must be vigilant against focusing solely on a conventional, symmetric future conflict and would be wise to acknowledge the coexistence of multiple categories of dangerous actors.
The desire to author a new grand strategy is a longstanding and understandable tradition in U.S. foreign policy. In reality, however, a grand strategy debate is likely to degenerate into unproductive arguments where few objective criteria exist to evaluate competing proposals.
While we should not go back to a time where military wages failed to keep pace with civilian salaries, neither should we succumb to cost disease. We must invest in understanding and increasing labor productivity.
That the United States should reflexively seek to remain in arms control agreements, even if they do not contribute to U.S. national security, is a bad idea in national security.
Continuing to shroud government actions behind a veil of secrecy will only deepen the divide between that government and the people it is supposed to serve.
Small fleets of aircraft are eroding the purchasing power of the Air Force and limiting its ability to grow or even sustain the size of its current force.
The Wolf Amendment has neither discouraged Chinese space ambitions or altered China’s behavior on human rights—it has only muddled our relationship with China and created an opening for a challenger to NASA’s leadership role in space exploration.
A strategic overcorrection has put China at the center of virtually every U.S. national security conversation and consideration. That positioning is at once distracting the United States from appropriately responding to growing trans-regional geopolitical volatility while also failing to achieve outcomes in U.S. China policy.