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In “Overview of the 2019 President’s Budget Request for Defense,” a Feb. 15, 2018, report from the Center for a New American Security, authors Susanna Blume, a CNAS Defense Strategies and Assessment Program fellow, and Lauren Fish, a research associate with the program, provide a bird’s-eye look at what the White House’s FY19 defense-budget request means for readiness, procurement, research, development, test and evaluation, the Missile Defense Agency, US Army, US Navy, US Marine Corps and US Air Force, and the US Defense Department, as a whole. “Even in these times of increasing budgets, DoD must still make tough decisions about what to prioritize and where to accept risk,” they write.

In “Power and Influence in a Globalized World,” a February 2018 joint report from the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, the University of Denver’s Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures and the Hague Center for Strategic Studies, authors Jonathon Moyer, PhD, Pardee Center director, Tim Sweijs, HCSS research director, Mathew Burrows, PhD, director of Scowcroft’s Foresight, Strategy, and Risks Initiative, and Hugo Van Manen, a junior consultant at Ecorys, present “the Foreign Bilateral Influence Capacity (FBIC) Index,” which looks to take an intersectional approach to evaluating the power and influence of global states. “The FBIC is tasked with identifying the key influencers in the international community, and analyzing those that register above or below their weight in the world, altogether clarifying where the United States and others stand in the international system,” the Atlantic Council writes. “The FBIC Index is based on the interaction between states, as well as the relative dependence of one state on another.

In his February 2018 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ International Security Program, Col. Mark Cancian, USMC Ret., a senior adviser at CSIS, argues that “the return of great power competition” after a seven-decade-plus hiatus makes dealing with strategic surprise an urgent matter. “This study, therefore, examines potential surprises in a great power conflict, particularly in a conflict’s initial stages when the interaction of adversaries’ technologies, prewar plans, and military doctrines first becomes manifest,” he writes. “It is not an attempt to project the future. Rather, it seeks to do the opposite: explore the range of possible future conflicts to see where surprises might lurk.”