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In “A Blueprint for New Sanctions on North Korea,” a new report from the Center for a New American Security, co-authors Edward Fishman, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, Peter Harrell, an adjunct senior fellow at CNAS, and Elizabeth Rosenberg, CNAS senior fellow and director of its Energy, Economics, and Security Program, present a playbook for potential US sanctions on North Korea. “As Congress and the executive branch consider ways to combat the North Korean threat, this report offers policymakers an analysis of the situation, an assessment of the successes and failures of sanctions imposed to date, and options for increasing Pyongyang’s economic isolation,” they write. “With enhanced economic leverage, the United States will be better placed to address North Korea’s destabilizing influence and lay the table for potential nuclear diplomacy.”

In the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments’ “Overview of the FY 2018 Defense Budget Request,” Katherine Blakeley, CSBA research fellow, breaks down the Trump administration’s proposed defense budget for the coming fiscal year. “This proposed $603 billion in discretionary base national defense spending would be $51.8 billion dollars more than the $551 billion the Obama administration requested in FY 2017, an increase of 9.4 percent,” she writes in the report’s overview. “The requested $603 billion is also $54 billion, or 10 percent, over the caps on national defense spending for FY 2018 established by the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA), as amended.”

In a July 2017 report published by the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies entitled “An Operational Imperative: The Future of Air Superiority,” Brig. Gen. Alex Grynkewich, USAF, reflects on his work as part of an interdisciplinary team charged with reviewing “options to gain and maintain continued control of the air,” according to a press release. Grynkewich writes that the US Defense Department needs to change its approaches to data and acquisition to achieve “air superiority in the future.”

In his new report entitled “Consolidating the Revolution: Optimizing the Potential of Remotely Piloted Aircraft,” Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF Ret., dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, argues that the US needs to revamp its use of remotely piloted aircraft, or RPAs, since demand for them will stay high despite falling defense budgets.