D360’s Bad Ideas in National Security series features short articles from CSIS and outside scholars on recently considered and not too obvious bad ideas in the defense and foreign policy space.
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.
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.
We should stop talking about cybersecurity, not because “cyber issues” are over-hyped, but because the challenges and constantly evolving threat landscape involving cyber are so complex, and we cannot afford to continue operating under an already overextended definition.
Jointness, meaning cross-service cooperation, is generally a good thing. But one can have too much of a good thing, and the Pentagon has too much jointness. Jointness in organizing military operations makes so much sense that the concept is overprescribed. Enhancing interservice competition for resources and relevance would encourage military innovation, civilian control, and economies in the vast Pentagon budget.
There are a myriad of steps the federal government could take to improve its ability to investigate cybercrime and cases that involve digital evidence. But it is pursuing technologically inadvisable solutions that would lessen everyone’s security and seriously jeopardize our national security.
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.
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.
U.S. Space Command was recently re-established as a geographic command. But the responsibilities and missions required of Space Command are a better fit for a functional command focused on interoperability, support, and coordination with the other combatant commands and military services.
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.