Preparing for future salvo competitions will require a "system of systems" approach, Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said Friday in Washington, D.C. "There is no one silver bullet that is going to solve the missile defense challenge" the US is facing, Clark said. Defeating large precision-guided missile salvos will require kinetic defenses, non-kinetic defenses, and battle management systems, Clark and co-author Mark Gunzinger said in a report called, "Winning the Salvo Competition: Rebalancing America's Air and Missile Defenses."

The U.S. Navy could save money by shifting its missile-salvo defensive anti-air warfare (AAW) strategy away from long-range interceptors and toward medium-range surface-to-air interceptors, hypervelocity projectiles, directed energy weapons and electronic warfare systems, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA).

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 “These assumptions are no longer valid.”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...