“This is a serious escalation,” said Mark Gunzinger, a former Air Force bomber pilot who is now a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. 

Denying an enemy access to a particular piece of air, land or sea is a strategy as old as warfare but the term entered the popular military consciousness in the late 1990s and the early 2000s 

As Mark Gunzinger and Bryan Clark argue in a recent report, defending against these threats will require non-kinetic technologies capable of defeating larger missile salvos at a far lower cost than the “hit-to-kill” system in operation today. Specifically, Gunzinger and Clark call for a mix of shorter range, lower cost, kinetic capabilities combined with “left-of-launch” technologies, such as lasers and electronic warfare countermeasures that enable defeat of a missile before it has been launched...

"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 "These assumptions are no longer valid."

While the U.S. may have superiority among all global military forces due to the sheer numbers of its military forces, weapons, jets, ships and tanks alone, one think tank is now saying the U.S. has to think harder. In today’s war, sheer number alone cannot ensure victory, not if there are guided missile systems that can take out your assets before you can even deploy them. This is one of the foremost findings by Mark Gunzinger and Bryan Clark in their latest report for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. It is not because the Pentagon is not trying hard to close the missile threat gap...

The US military "has become accustomed to assuming" its opponents either can't strike US bases and forces overseas with precision, or don't have the capacity to overwhelm US defenses, but "neither of these assumptions are correct today," Mark Gunzinger, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said Friday.