D360’s Bad Ideas in National Security series features short articles from our scholars on recently considered and not too obvious bad ideas in the defense and foreign policy space.
If the U.S. is truly planning for a competition with China, it will need to plan for a long-term effort. The planning should be clear about who and what are opposed, what the U.S. expects from China to avoid conflict escalation, the minimal acceptable change it seeks from the Chinese government, and how far the U.S. is willing to go.
As the administration moves forward with establishing a new military service focused on space, leaders should keep their language clear and use this opportunity to educate the public about both civil and national security space. Keeping NASA and the Space Force separate rhetorically and organizationally is best for national security and for space exploration.
In a world where unmanned aerial vehicles are plentiful, cruise missiles are becoming more abundant, and hypersonic boost glide vehicles are just over the horizon, air and missile threats are coming from all directions. To address the realities of this environment, effective defenses require an air and missile defense sensor architecture that looks in all directions as well.
It’s time we ditch the two percent (or any percent) of GDP metric for allied defense spending and focus on what really matters—capability, capacity, readiness, and interoperability. In the end, it’s not about how much of our allies’ economic output is directed to defense, and this metric does little to incentivize the results we want to see.
The Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) can and should be improved. But tossing out the FAR completely and starting over will slow, not accelerate, acquisition in the near term. Worse, it will ultimately undermine the usefulness of the alternative pathways that we are currently developing.
A group of reformers in both Congress and the executive branch have a common diagnosis of the Department of Defense’s (DoD) weapon system acquisition process: it is too slow and rigid. The DoD News coverage of Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Mike Griffin’s comments this past April succinctly summarize this concern: Download full report “The…
In Washington, military alliances have become an end in themselves rather than a means to security; an icon for worship, instead of a policy with costs and benefits worth weighing. Permanent defense guarantees inflate U.S. military costs, makes rich states into enfeebled dependents, and heightens the danger of getting pulled into needless wars. It should be obvious that U.S. alliances should serve U.S. security interests. But if alliances are permanent, U.S. security interests serve them.
One of the often-used excuses given by Congress not to authorize a new round of Base Realignment and Closures (BRAC) is that the military is currently growing and could use the excess capacity to house that growth. But executing a BRAC round while the force is scheduled to grow will allow DoD to think critically about where that growth should go, instead of simply sending it to where there is room.
We recognize that the magnitude of the threats posed by malicious cyber activity leads people to look for a big, bold, visible sign of change. Creating a U.S. Department of Cybersecurity is not the answer. We cannot stovepipe thinking about cybersecurity into one centralized place or approach. The threat is so pervasive and so severe that it requires a recognition that a change in thinking is necessary for everyone operating an enterprise.
Although the Trump administration has not yet released its Missile Defense Review, as mandated by Congress, it is considering the possible deployment of space-based interceptors. At a time of growing budgetary pressures as well as increased competition with other great powers, the United States can ill afford to waste precious dollars on space-based missile defenses and a new arms race that will make us less, rather than more, secure.