CSIS Reports
21 total works
More than a decade into the "war on terrorism," much of the political debate in the United States is still fixated on the legacy of 9/11. US politics has a partisan fixation on Benghazi, the Boston Marathon bombing, intelligence intercepts, and Guantanamo. Far too much attention still focuses on "terrorism" at a time the United States faces a much broader range of threats from the instability in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Islamic world.
The Afghan War in 2013: Meeting the Challenges of Transition
by Anthony H. Cordesman, Bryan Gold, and Ashley Hess
Published 28 May 2013
After more than a decade of fighting in Afghanistan, the United States and its allies are set to transfer security responsibilities to Afghan forces in 2014. This transition poses many challenges, and much will depend on the future of Afghan politics, governance, corruption, development, security, and economics. How the United States manages the transition is vital for any hopes of creating a secure Afghanistan, as well as preventing the reemergence of the Taliban and other terrorist groups. The Afghan War in 2013 honestly assesses the benefits, costs, and risks involved in transition. It is essential reading for an in-depth understanding of the complex forces and intricacies of the United States' role in Afghanistan and the difficulties involved in creating a stable Afghanistan in 2014 and beyond. Afghanistan is still at war and will probably be at war long after 2014. At the same time, the coming cuts in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and cuts in military and civil aid, along with the country's fractious politics and insecurity, will interact with a wide range of additional factors that threaten to derail the transition. These factors, examined in this three-volume study, highlight the need to make the internal political, governmental, economic, and security dimensions of the transition as effective as possible. This will require a new degree of realism about what the Afghans can and cannot accomplish, about the best approaches to shaping the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), and the need for better planned and managed outside aid.
This report analyzes four key aspects of US and Iranian strategic competition--sanctions, energy, arms control, and regime change. Its primary focus is on the ways in which the sanctions applied to Iran have changed US and Iranian competition since the fall of 2011. This escalation has been spurred by the creation of a series of far stronger US unilateral sanctions and the European Union's imposition of equally strong sanctions, both of which affect Iran's ability to export, its financial system, and its overall economy.
Gulf Military Balance
by Anthony H. Cordesman, Robert M Shelala, and Omar Mohamed, Sidi
Published 1 January 2014
The United States faces major challenges in dealing with Iran, the threat of terrorism, and the tide of political instability in the Arabian Peninsula. The presence of some of the world's largest reserves of oil and natural gas, vital shipping lanes, and Shia populations throughout the region have made the peninsula the focal point of US and Iranian strategic competition. Moreover, large youth populations, high unemployment rates, and political systems with highly centralized power bases have posed other economic, political, and security challenges that the Gulf states must address and that the United States must take into consideration when forming strategy and policy.
The Indian Ocean Region (IOR) is one of the most areas of the world in human terms. This study provides a comprehensive overview of the subregions and countries in the IOR, drawing heavily on a new country risk assessment model developed by Abdullah Toukan, a senior associate with the Burke Chair at CSIS. It provides detailed graphs, tables, and maps covering the IOR as a whole, each major subregion, and each of the thirty-two countries in the region as well as the impact of U.S. and Chinese military forces.
This new study covers the civil and military lessons of the war in Afghanistan as of 2015, the trends at the time of transition, and the risks inherent in the current approach to supporting Afghanistan. The report focuses on the lessons to be learned from the US experience in Afghanistan to date and the problems Afghanistan faces now that most US and allied combat forces have left. The work builds on more than a decade's worth of reporting and analysis of the Afghan war. It examines the recent trends and problems in Afghan governance, trends in the fighting, progress in the Afghan security forces, and what may be a growing crisis in the Afghan economy. The analysis is supported with extensive metrics on every major military and civil aspect of the war, a detailed analysis of the fighting, and a close examination of the problems resulting from the lack of Afghan political unity, the growing Afghan budget crisis, and critical problems with power brokers and corruption.
This report tracks and analyzes trends in Chinese military strategy, force structure, and regional activity. Open source material is used to detail how each branch of the People's Liberation Army has pursued modernization. Chinese perspectives on their military's role and development are featured, as well as the views of other relevant regional actors. The purpose of this report is to provide the basis for an unclassified dialogue on the military developments in China. By presenting data on the regional military balance alongside perspectives on China's military development, the Burke Chair hopes that readers can better understand how China's strategic goals, military development, and regional views interact with each other.
Iran's Rocket and Missile Forces and Strategic Options
by Anthony H. Cordesman
Published 1 January 2015
Iran's rocket and missile forces serve a wide range of Iranian strategic objectives. These forces range from relatively short-range artillery rockets that support its ground forces and limit the need for close air support to long-range missiles that can reach any target in the region and the development of booster systems that might give Iran the ability to strike at targets throughout Europe and even in the United States. Iran's forces and systems are steadily evolving. While the lethality of most current systems is limited by a reliance on conventional warheads, poor accuracy, and uncertain reliability, Iran is developing steadily improved guidance systems, attempting to improve the lethality of its conventional warheads, and has at least studied arming its missiles with nuclear warheads.
The Arabian Gulf is now involved in a massive arms race, triggered largely by the fear that Iran will try to use its military forces to intimidate or dominate its neighbors. Iran has threatened to close the Gulf and carried out a wide range of large military exercises to show its capabilities. And Iran has steadily increased its ability to exploit the threat of conventional and asymmetric warfare to maritime traffic in the Gulf. The buildup of Iran's naval, air, and missile capabilities poses a wide range of threats to maritime traffic into and outside of the Gulf.
The Evolving Military Balance in the Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asia
by Anthony H. Cordesman and Ashley Hess
Published 10 July 2013
The Evolving Military Balance in the Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asia describes the strategy, force deployments, and the military balance in potential current and future scenarios involving the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Republic of Korea, People's Republic of China, Japan, and the United States. The analysis in these volumes shows how tensions between the Koreas-and the potential involvement of the China, Japan, Russia, and the United States-create a nearly open-ended spectrum of possible conflicts. These range from posturing and threats ("wars of intimidation") to a major conventional conflict on the Korean Peninsula to intervention by outside powers like the United States and China to the extreme of nuclear conflict. The analysis shows that the Korean balance is sharply affected by the uncertain mix of cooperation and competition between the United States and China. The U.S. rebalancing of its forces to Asia and the steady modernization of Chinese forces, in particular the growth of Chinese sea-air-missile capabilities, affect the balance in the Koreas and Northeast Asia. They also raise the possibility of far more intense conflicts that could extend far beyond the boundaries of the Koreas.
The Changing Military Balance in the Koreas and Northeast Asia
by Anthony H. Cordesman and Aaron Lin
Published 7 September 2015
The tensions between the Koreas-and the potential involvement of China, Japan, Russia, and the United States in a Korean conflict-create a nearly open-ended spectrum of possible conflicts. These conflicts could range from posturing and threats to a major conventional conflict on the Korean peninsula, with intervention by outside powers, to the extreme of nuclear conflict. The Korean balance is also affected by the uncertain mix of cooperation and competition between the United States and China, particularly with the U.S. "pivot" toward Asia and the steady modernization of Chinese forces. This new volume, up to date through Spring 2015, provides a detailed examination of the military forces in Northeast Asia-North and South Korea, China, Russia, Japan, and the United States-setting those forces in the larger geostrategic context.
Chinese Strategy and Military Modernization in 2015
by Anthony H. Cordesman and Steven Colley
Published 12 March 2016
China's emergence as a global economic superpower, and as a major regional military power in Asia and the Pacific, has had a major impact on its relations with the United States and its neighbors. China was the driving factor in the new strategy the United States announced in 2012 that called for a "rebalance" of U.S. forces to the Asia-Pacific region. At the same time, China's actions on its borders, in the East China Sea, and in the South China Sea have shown that it is steadily expanding its geopolitical role in the Pacific and having a steadily increasing impact on the strategy and military developments in other Asian powers.
Chinese Military Modernization and Force Development
by Anthony H. Cordesman, Ashley Hess, and Nicholas S. Yarosh
Published 1 January 2013
China's military development has become a key focus of US security policy as well as that of virtually all Asia-Pacific states. This report from the CSIS Burke Chair in Strategy examines trends in Chinese strategy, military spending, and military forces based on Chinese defense white papers and other official Chinese sources; US reporting by the Department of Defense and other defense agencies; and other government sources, including Japanese and Korean defense white papers and the International Monetary Fund. The analysis also draws on the work of experts outside of government, various research centers, and nongovernmental organizations.
The Arab-U.S. Strategic Partnership and the Changing Security Balance in the Gulf
by Anthony H. Cordesman
Published 10 January 2016
The ongoing confrontation with Iran, the war against ISIL, the instability in Iraq, the Civil war in Syria, and the conflict in Yemen have all caused major changes in the security situation in the Persian Gulf and in the regional military balance. The strategic partnership between Arab Gulf states, and with the United States and other outside states, must now evolve to deal with conventional military threats and a range of new threats, including ideological extremists, non-state actors and their state sponsors, and a growing range of forces designed to fight asymmetric wars. This new report from the CSIS Burke Chair in Strategy provides a 2015 assessment of the Gulf military balance, the military capabilities of each Gulf state, the role of the United States as a security partner, and the priorities for change in the structure of both the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab Gulf military partnership with the United States. The assessment goes far beyond the conventional military balance and examines how force developments in the region affect joint and asymmetric warfare, missiles and missile defense, nuclear forces, as well as terrorism, the role of non-state actors, and outside powers.
Iraq is a nation in crisis bordering on civil war. The country now faces growing violence, a steady rise in Sunni Islamist extremism, an increasingly authoritarian leader that favors Iraq's Sunnis, and growing ethnic tension between Arabs and Kurds. The recent Iraqi election offers little promise that it can correct the corruption, the weaknesses in its security forces, and the critical failures in governance, economic development, and leadership. The problems Iraq faces in 2014 are a legacy of mistakes made during and after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, but increasingly the nation is dealing with the self-inflicted wounds of its leaders who abuse human rights, repress opposing factions, and misuse the Iraqi police and security forces to their own end.