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In his opening statement, Bryan Clark, a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments who previously served on the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations, noted: "Shipbuilding for the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard is the largest single user of American steel for military and homeland defense, with steel making up about half of a warship’s weight. A 100,000-ton aircraft carrier, for example, requires about 48,000 tons of steel, and the fleet overall contains about six million tons of American-made steel." Today, the U.S. Navy is the smallest it's been since 1916. Clark pointed out that America's current fleet is overworked and under-maintained, noting that the timing is troublesome, when terrorist threats such as the Islamic State remain a concern and attacks on Western targets continue.

The ask-fors were presented during the Congressional Steel Caucus' annual hearing, “America Rebounding: Steel in 2017 and Beyond,” on March 29 at Capitol Hill. The meeting featured members of the steel caucus and steel industry representatives including Roger Newport, CEO of AK Steel; Tracy Porter, executive vice president of Commercial Metals Company; Edward Vore, CEO of ArcelorMittal Tubular Products; Terence Hartford, vice president of ATI Defense; Tom Conway, international vice president of United Steelworkers; Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing; and Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

The service desperately needs more aircraft to provide more flying hours for its pilots and a low-cost OA-X could be just the answer the Air Force is looking for

The uptick in violence over Mosul and around Islamic State’s self-styled capital of Raqqa in northern Syria is the result of “relaxed rules of engagement, hard urban fighting and an unimaginably brutal enemy,” said Hal Brands, the former Pentagon adviser who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

The president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Tom Mahnken, recently stated in congressional testimony that “wars of the future may no longer lie that far in the future and that these wars are likely to differ considerably both from the great-power wars of the past as well as the campaigns that we have been waging since the turn of the millennium.” Regardless of which strategy or strategies are chosen by governments in this potential return to great power competition, the competitive edge generated by highly professional military personnel honed to individual and collective excellence must be a foundational element. Mastering the profession of arms will be one of the cornerstones of military organizations that seek to successfully prosecute operations in the age of digital warfare.

In April 2012, when the past regime lost Panatag Shoal, the Washington security think-tank Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) urged: “The United States needs to help the Philippines develop its own set of ‘anti-access/area denial’ capabilities to counter China’s growing power projection capabilities.”