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National Security Policy Studies

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• President Obama’s 2011 Budget: How Congress Can Reform Defense Spending and Address Shortfalls

  By Mackenzie Eaglen, The Heritage Foundation
  
  WebMemo, 02/04/2010
  

  Congress should address the Pentagon’s underfunded plans and remedy many cuts from last year’s inadequate defense budget.

  
  
  

• Submarine Arms Race in the Pacific: The Chinese Challenge to U.S. Undersea Supremacy

  By Mackenzie Eaglen, Jon Rodeback, The Heritage Foundation
  
  WebMemo, 02/03/2010
  

  Since the end of the Cold War, China has dramatically expanded its navy, especially its submarine fleet, adding dozens of attack submarines since 1995. During the same period, the U.S. attack submarine fleet has shrunk to 53, and is projected to fall to 41 in 2028. The U.S. fleet is already stretched thin by the demands of ongoing operations. Australia, India, and other Pacific countries have taken note of the shifting balance and have responded with their own naval buildups, particularly of their submarine fleets. Unless the U.S. stops—and reverses—the decline of its own fleet, U.S. military superiority in the Pacific will continue to wane, severely limiting the Navy’s ability to operate in the region, to protect U.S. interests, and to support U.S. friends and allies.

  
  
  

• Mothers in Combat Boots

  By Mary Eberstadt, Hoover Institution
  
  Policy Review, 02/03/2010
  

  This is one face of contemporary battle that no one wants to contemplate point-blank. Nevertheless, face it somebody should. Ever since Congress in the 1970s passed a law allowing women with dependent children to enlist in the military, the collision visible in the Hutchinson case between motherhood and soldiering has been waiting in the wings. The wonder is not that an Army cook and mother would choose staying stateside with her child over her deployment. It is rather that — given two wars and current American military policy — more cases like Hutchinson’s have not erupted already.

  
  
  

• The Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review: Simply an Extension of the President’s 2010 Defense Budget Plans

  By Mackenzie Eaglen, The Heritage Foundation
  
  WebMemo, 02/02/2010
  

  The QDR lacks long-term vision and serves largely as an analytical justification for current defense plans and programs.

  
  
  

• Tanker Contest Headed For Sole-Source Award

  By Loren B. Thompson, Lexington Institute
  
  Issue Brief, 02/01/2010
  

  Senior executives at Northrop Grumman have made a tentative decision not to bid in the Air Force’s pending re-competition of its KC-X aerial-refueling tanker. Only a year ago, Northrop looked like the odds-on favorite to win the contract for the future tanker, which will be worth about $35 billion for the first increment of 179 planes, but could ultimately be valued at over $100 billion as the service replaces the rest of its 450 Eisenhower-era refuelers. Northrop’s startling reversal of fortune is traceable to the collision of two forces: a new administration determined to tighten up terms on contractors, and a new corporate CEO determined to assess rigorously the risks and rewards of business opportunities.

  
  
  

• Change and the American Security Paradigm

  By Kenneth Allard, Foreign Policy Research Institute
  
  Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs, 01/29/2010
  

  Two hundred years of U.S. history have inevitably reshaped and softened its basic outlines. But it is worth recalling that the federal system was founded on the assumption that experimentation and innovation were best performed at the state and local levels, the natural laboratories of future directions for the nation. Because its success ultimately depends more upon measures applied by the several states than in Washington, D.C., perhaps the transformation of homeland security is the appropriate place to re-apply lessons that the Founders knew very well. In adjusting the bureaucratic, top-heavy superstructure currently characterizing the U.S. security establishment, perhaps it is now time to begin reversing the pyramid.

  
  
  

• How the United States Lost the Naval War of 2015

  By James Kraska, Foreign Policy Research Institute
  
  Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs, 01/29/2010
  

  Years of strategic missteps in oceans policy, naval strategy and a force structure in decline set the stage for U.S. defeat at sea in 2015. After decades of double-digit budget increases, the People’s Liberation Army (Navy) was operating some of the most impressive systems in the world, including a medium-range ballistic missile that could hit a moving aircraft carrier and a super-quiet diesel electric submarine that was stealthier than U.S. nuclear submarines. Coupling this new asymmetric naval force to visionary maritime strategy and oceans policy, China ensured that all elements of national power promoted its goal of dominating the East China Sea. The United States, in contrast, had a declining naval force structured around 10 aircraft carriers spread thinly throughout the globe. With a maritime strategy focused on lower order partnerships, and a national oceans policy that devalued strategic interests in freedom of navigation, the stage was set for defeat at sea. This article recounts how China destroyed the USS George Washington in the East China Sea in 2015. The political fallout from the disaster ended 75 years of U.S. dominance in the Pacific Ocean and cemented China’s position as the Asian hegemon.

  
  
  

• The State of the U.S. Military

  By Mackenzie Eaglen, The Heritage Foundation
  
  White Paper, 01/28/2010
  

  The U.S. government’s primary job is to provide for the common defense. Regrettably, the collective decisions by Congress and both Democratic and Republican Presidents over the past 15 years have left the U.S. military using equipment that is extremely old and, in many cases, outdated. While compensation for military personnel continues to rise necessarily and deservedly, defense investment in modern systems to replace the vast arsenal of the military’s high-end platforms, like ships, planes, and tanks, is falling. Robust investment in next-generation equipment is needed now so that the troops who sign up in 10 years can also reap the benefits of American military primacy.

  
  
  

• State of the Union Should Be “State of War” Presidential Address

  By James Jay Carafano, The Heritage Foundation
  
  WebMemo, 01/26/2010
  

  The President’s State of the Union address should offer solid and concrete commitments to defend the U.S., protect this nation’s liberties, and promote American prosperity.

  
  
  

• Biometric Exit Programs Show Need for New Strategy to Reduce Visa Overstays

  By Diem Nguyen, Jena Baker McNeill, The Heritage Foundation
  
  Backgrounder, 01/26/2010
  

  Despite Congress’s mandate in 2007 that the Department of Homeland Security track all foreign visitors biometrically by June 2009, DHS missed the deadline, and biometric exit, as opposed to the current biographic approach, has proved costly without adding much additional security. Following is a plan on how Congress can break the stalemate—and provide useful data and security for Americans as well as the many visitors who come to the U.S. every year.

  
  
  
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National Security Features

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• Make America Safer By Making Government Smaller

  By Lawrence W. Reed
  
  December 09, 2004
  

  Few Americans would argue with the proposition that the most critical, indeed the most indispensable, duty of the federal government is to protect the American people from foreign attack. If it loses your mail or forgets to feed the elephants at the National Zoo, we’ll manage to get by. But...

  
  
  

• President Reagan and Missile Defense: The Realization of a Vision

  By Baker Spring
  
  April 01, 2003
  

  “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter…attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?” Exactly 20 years ago today, President...

  
  
  

• A Defense Agenda for 21st-Century Warfare

  By Jack Spencer
  
  September 01, 2001
  

  On September 11, America suffered a deliberate and coordinated attack on its soil. Despite numerous warnings that terrorists could attack the U.S. homeland and significant increases in counterterrorism spending during the last Administration, the hijacking and commandeering of U.S. civilian planes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center exposed...