Author Vago Muradian

“The United States confronts challenges from revisionist great powers such as China and Russia, aggressive rogue states such as Iran and North Korea, and international terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State,” the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments writes of “Avoiding a Strategy of Bluff: The Crisis of American Military Primacy,” a new report by CSBA Senior Fellow Hal Brands and CSBA Counselor Eric Edelman, published March 20, 2017.

On October 28, 2016, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) hosted a daylong conference, including senior defense and intelligence policymakers, military leaders, strategists, regional experts, international and industry partners, and others, to discuss the Defense Department’s Third Offset Strategy. In order to understand what the Third Offset Strategy is, it is first necessary to understand the challenges and trends it is addressing. Technological superiority has been a foundation of U.S. military dominance for decades. However, the assumption of U.S. technological superiority as the status quo has been challenged in recent years as near-peer competitors have sought a variety of asymmetric capabilities to counter the overwhelming conventional military advantages possessed by the United States.

Frederick Kagan, who directs the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute, Kimberly Kagan, president of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), Jennifer Cafarella, lead intelligence planner at ISW, and the ISW and CTP analysts, recommend a course of action (COA) for the United States in Syria. The report is the culmination of a series of exercises to frame and develop a strategy to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (ISIS) and al Qaeda in Syria. The report is the fourth in AEI’s US Grand Strategy series.

As Congress prepares to review the administration’s proposed defense budget, the Center for a New American Security Defense Strategies and Assessments Program has released a new report, “Is the U.S. Military Getting Smaller and Older? And How Much Should We Care?” In the report, author Steven Kosiak argues that the U.S. military’s declining force size and increasing age are not simply a byproduct of budgetary or other pressures beyond the Department of Defense’s control. Rather, they are largely the result of policy and programmatic choices made by DoD and service leadership. He concludes that if the military wants to arrest these trends it will require a shift in the decisionmaking process of its leadership.