Resources
CSBA’s research on the most pressing issues in U.S. national security continues to shape the defense agenda. CSBA’s research focuses on four main areas:
Strategy & Policy
Today, the United States confronts a number of challenges to its national security: the rise of China, a revisionist Russia, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and disruption, and the spread of Islamic extremism. The United States finds itself tackling these challenges at a time when its primacy is increasingly contested and its economic foundation eroding. CSBA seeks to inform the development of U.S. strategy by developing innovative options to reconcile ends and means, and by identifying sources of enduring advantage to help the U.S. sustain its position and meet challenges of the 21st century.
Studies
The Three-Body Problem: Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications
The United States is facing a novel and even more challenging version of the problems that past cohorts of policymakers confronted during the Cold War. The United States must now simultaneously deter two nuclear peers –something it has never done. China and Russia are developing and deploying capabilities that could threaten the U.S. nuclear system. The potential that they might take joint, concerted action further complicates the calculus of deterrence. As a result, U.S. government officials are facing an issue that last bedeviled their predecessors some 40 years ago –the prospect of nuclear decapitation.