Publications

For well over half a century, the United States has been a global power with global interests. These interests include (but are not limited to) extending and defending democratic rule, maintaining access to key trading partners and resources, and reassuring those allies and partners who cooperate with the United States in defending common interests. The United States’ ability to project and sustain military power on a large scale has been, and remains, essential to this endeavor.

Senior defense officials face a host of critical issues when assessing the nation’s military posture. Most importantly, they are responsible for determining which threats the United States must be prepared to address, what capabilities will be required to do so, and how the US military should be organized, trained, equipped, and employed to counter these threats successfully if and when they materialize.

This report seeks to provide the basis for an informed and constructive debate over the role of nuclear weapons in the overall US defense posture. To this end, the principal focus is on identifying the existing and emerging security environment as it pertains to nuclear weapons. The report also offers some recommendations on how the United States might best respond to the challenges posed by nuclear proliferation, and, hopefully, create a more secure global environment.

This monograph discusses the current state of the United States Air Force and how it can better align its institutional identity and force posture to the future security environment. It offers a fiscally-constrained menu of recommendations for how that realignment might be realized over the next twenty years, with a larger force posture in mind.

The central argument of this report is that, in light of the complex and intensifying security challenges the United States now faces, the nation can no longer afford poor strategic performance. The time to reverse the decline in US strategic competence is long overdue. The first task is for American political and military leaders to develop a clearer understanding of what strategy actually is, and what cognitive skills are necessary to craft and implement good strategies.

The Obama Administration has requested a total of $668 billion for the Department of Defense (DoD) in the FY 2010 budget. The “base” budget for the Department includes $534 billion in discretionary funding and an additional $4 billion in mandatory funding. The budget also includes, for the first time, full-year funding for the wars in Iraq and  Afghanistan—now termed Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO). The cost of the wars is estimated at $130 billion for FY 2010. In real terms, the base DoD budget is an $18 billion increase over last year’s budget, while the funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a $17 billion decrease from FY 2009.