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Experts dismissed Carter’s demurral. “The lifting of the arms embargo on Vietnam may not be publicly stated as directed against China,” said Andrew Krepinevich, president emeritus of the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments, “[but] diplomatic niceties aside, it is a clear and welcome sign that the United States is becoming serious about maintaining peace and stability in the region in the face of China’s increasingly belligerent behavior.” “Through its overtures to the Philippines and now Vietnam, the United States has the potential to transform China’s militarization of South China Sea islands into a military cul-de-sac, flanked by the Philippines to the east and Vietnam to the west,” said Krepinevich. “Secretary Carter deserves a great deal of credit for these encouraging initiatives to demonstrate U.S. resolve in the defense of peace, stability and respect for the rules-based international order.”

Mark Gunzinger is Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments…and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Forces Transformation and Resources. He and his colleague at CSBA, former Special Assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations Bryan Clark, have released “Winning the Salvo Competition: Rebalancing America’s Air and Missile Defenses” to serve as a how-to guide for reshaping missile defense policy and capability. Gunzinger discussed their work on National Defense Week.

“Since the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon had the luxury of assuming that air and missile attacks on its bases and forces would either not occur or would be within the capacity of the limited defenses it has fielded,” analysts Mark Gunzinger and Bryan Clark wrote for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an influential defense policy think tank. “These assumptions are no longer valid.”

U.S. Marine Corps plans to land F-35B Joint Strike Fighters and MV-22 Osprey tiltrotors for dispersed vertical-insertion operations within enemy target areas could counter strategies to strike U.S. forces with missile salvos, says Mark Gunzinger, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA).

In a report out this morning, CSBA scholars Bryan Clark and Mark Gunzinger argue that we don’t just need new technology and new tactics to confront the growing missile threats from China and Russia, though lasers, railguns, and hypervelocity projectiles are all useful. We need a different missile defense mindset than what we have today, one that trusts computers to shoot down incoming weapons at literally the last minute...

“I think everybody saw the Senate bill, and they said ‘Whoa,’” Katherine Blakeley, a fellow with Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, told Bloomberg BNA. “It would be a very big change.”…House Armed Services Committee (HASC) Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) agrees, Blakeley said. “I don't think he is sold on these proposed management changes,” she said.