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
Search Publications
Studies
Critical Assumptions and American Grand Strategy
Every grand strategy rests on a set of critical assumptions about how the world works. Today, the assumptions underpinning American grand strategy are becoming more contested and uncertain than at any time in a generation.
Studies
Avoiding a Strategy of Bluff: The Crisis of American Military Primacy
If strategy is the calculated relation of means to ends, then today America is careening toward strategic insolvency. Following the Cold War, the United States possessed unrivaled military primacy, both globally and in all the world’s key strategic theaters.
Studies
Contain, Degrade, and Defeat: A Defense Strategy for a Troubled Middle East
The decade and a half the United States has spent fighting the "long war" in the Middle East has yielded many tactical successes but left a lasting victory elusive. The inconclusive nature of these struggles has sapped support for the U.S. policy of shouldering the burden of providing security and stability in the region.
Studies
After ISIS: U.S. Political-Military Strategy in the Global War on Terror
Sooner or later, and probably within the next few months, the United States and its coalition partners will defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) militarily, by collapsing its control of key areas in Iraq and Syria.
Briefs
Improved Conventional Munitions Policy
The United States is unilaterally divesting itself of its cluster munitions by 2018. It is doing so based on a 2008 policy decision to comply with the Oslo Treaty, which restricts the use of cluster munitions, even though the United States is not a signatory to this treaty.
Studies
U.S. Strategy for Maintaining a Europe Whole and Free
From the mid-1930s through the Cold War, Europe was critical to U.S. strategic thinking, which developed around the assumption that foreign domination of Europe was inimical to U.S. national security. With the end of the Cold War, the United States sought to forge a Europe that was “whole and free.” However, since Putin has returned to office, he has launched a determined effort to reassert Moscow’s influence in areas formerly under Soviet control.