Publications
"Nobody does defense policy better than CSBA. Their work on strategic and budgetary topics manages to combine first-rate quality and in-depth research with timeliness and accessibility—which is why so many professionals consider their products indispensable." – Gideon Rose, Editor of Foreign Affairs, 2010-2021
Strengthening the U.S. Defense Maritime Industrial Base: A Plan to Improve Maritime Industry’s Contribution to National Security
CSBA’s report finds that a robust maritime industry, and the policies that support it, are increasingly important in an era of great power competition. However, the maritime industry and the broader national security innovation base face a range of pressures ranging from high regulatory compliance costs to predatory subsidized foreign competition that undermine their long-term viability, ability to innovate, and capacity to support future military operations.
Mosaic Warfare: Exploiting Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems to Implement Decision-Centric Operations
The United States is increasingly engaged in a long-term competition with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Russian Federation–a competition in which U.S. defense leaders and experts argue the U.S. military is falling behind technologically and operationally. U.S. forces, however, may be unable to gain and maintain superiority over their great power competitors by simply using improved versions of today’s forces to conduct modest variations on existing tactics.
Five Priorities for the Air Force’s Future Combat Air Force
The 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) calls for increasing the capacity, lethality, and survivability of the joint force in future contested threat environments. CSBA’s report recommends five priorities for the USAF’s combat air force (CAF) that support these objectives.
Taking Back the Seas: Transforming the U.S. Surface Fleet for Decision-Centric Warfare
The U.S. Navy’s surface fleet is at a crossroads. Today’s force lacks the size, resilience, and offensive capacity to contribute effectively to degrading, delaying, or denying aggression.
Winning the Invisible War: Gaining an Enduring U.S. Advantage in the Electromagnetic Spectrum
The proliferation and growing sophistication of civilian and military EMS capabilities has resulted in an increasingly congested and contested electromagnetic environment for which the U.S. military is unprepared. Over the past decade, several government and external assessments found that the U.S. military is falling behind Chinese and Russian forces in electronic warfare (EW) and that U.S. forces will be challenged to achieve EMS superiority in future conflicts.
Did Dollars Follow Strategy? A Review of the FY 2020 Defense Budget
On 1 October, the U.S. federal government ushers in its Fiscal Year (FY) 2020. If policymakers approve the $738 billion national defense budget – the amount agreed to by the White House and Congressional leaders in a July 2019 agreement – military spending will have increased in real terms for the fifth consecutive year.