Making Defense Affordable PDF Download

The CSIS Affordable Military Working Group, and the earlier CSIS Defense Drawdown Working Group, examined the dramatic effects of both fewer and weaker defense dollars in an effort to deal with a deep budget drawdown without significantly weakening national security. This latest report defines a set of strategy options, each with associated capabilities, gleaned from other leading think tank reports as well as the study team's analysis. The report identifies capability priorities for the 2021 and beyond security environment and recommends a force structure for a 2021 affordable military. The trend lines in the relationships between the United States and its near-peer competitors, China and Russia, are worsening, cooperation and competition have been largely replaced with competition, which itself is migrating toward conflict. While the CSIS study team agrees with the view of the current DoD leadership that sequester-level cuts will do irreparable damage to U.S. national security, we believe that the correct response is not denial and the continued submission of defense budget requests that do not conform to the Budget Control Act of 2011. Instead, we recommend that DoD embrace the cost-capped approach to coping with a deep defense drawdown and emulate the force planning approach taken in this report. We believe that a 2021 Affordable Military that is focused on the growing conflict with China and Russia is the 'least bad' option for this punishing fiscal context of fewer and weaker defense dollars. More important, we believe that the cost-capped methodology and its 2021 cost calculators offers the Department of Defense a disciplined, practical approach to the consideration of alternative militaries, each designed to execute a different strategy, in times of severe constraints on DoD budgets. Different administrations will make different choices, but under this proposed methodology, each military will be affordable.