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.
Public national security strategy documents tend to avoid making tradeoffs and inflate threats to the country, writes Ben Friedman. Eliminating these documents may not only make for better strategy but also better analysis and debate on U.S. national security policy.
The instinct to compare Ukraine and Taiwan is understandable, and there are critical lessons to be drawn from the war in Ukraine, but the parallels between Ukraine and Taiwan should not be overdrawn.
As the services now face an unprecedented recruitment crisis, there’s a temptation to rely on traditional, seemingly time-tested solutions to help the services meet recruitment targets. But relying on such traditional approaches is an insufficient and ineffective means of addressing the current challenge.
The defense community needs to manage expectations on PPBE reform and the degree to which it can improve commercial technology adoption, writes Jonathan Wong.
The 2022 NDS aims to “strengthen U.S. deterrence” to defend the status quo against America’s adversaries. But this strategy neglects the limits of deterrence. Instead, U.S. defense strategy should embrace an expanded concept of integrated influence with a broader focus on coercion and persuasion.
DoD has recently made efforts to improve the speed of innovation in defense, creating new organizations intended to improve innovation. But continuing down this path of “innovation theater” does little to change how the defense enterprise operates and adopts innovative ideas and technologies.