Regaining Strategic Competence

Abstract : In 2007 the Center for Strategic and Budget Assessments (CSBA) began a multi-year effort to develop a US defense posture and strategy for the long haul. This effort included a comprehensive review of the United States' defense budgets, Service and joint programs, defense industrial base, manpower requirements, military forces, operational concepts, planning scenarios, national-security structure, and strategy. The project had two principal aims. The first was to generate the sort of independent analysis and insight that might help the next administration craft a more balanced approach to meeting the complex needs of US national security in first half of the twenty-first century. The second was to jump-start the next Quadrennial Defense Review, which the Department of Defense now plans to complete during 2009. CSBA's long-haul effort was predicated on the view that the United States now faces three long-term security challenges that, in many respects, are more complex and divergent than those posed by Soviet power and ideology during the Cold War. During the long competition with the Soviet Union, the principal challenge the United States faced was containing Soviet expansionist tendencies until the Bolshevik regime (which George F. Kennan correctly diagnosed after World War II as bearing within it the seeds of its own decay) collapsed from within. Today, the principal security challenges confronting the United States are: defeating both the Sunni Salafi-Takfiri and Shia Khomeinist brands of Islamist radicalism; hedging against the rise of a more openly confrontational or hostile China; and preparing for a world in which there are progressively more nuclear-armed regional powers.