Center for a New American Security

The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) is pleased to announce that Lieutenant General David W. Barno, U.S. Army (retired), is joining CNAS as a Senior Advisor and Senior Fellow on May 1, 2010.  General Barno, currently Director of the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University (NDU), will contribute to the Center’s work on U.S. defense policy, military strategy, veterans’ affairs and South and Central Asia, among other issues.

The March 7 national election in Iraq and the period of government formation that will follow it carry enormous implications for both the future of the country and for U.S. policy there, according to a new CNAS policy brief by Senior Fellow Thomas E. Ricks.  With elections unlikely to resolve political struggles that fuel sectarian violence and Iraqi forces unable to stand alone, President Obama may find himself facing major decisions about troop levels and the U.S. role in post-election Iraq, writes Ricks.  

WASHINGTON, DC, FEBRUARY 22, 2010 – Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' recent firing of the F-35 Program Manager has heightened concerns in the policy community that the plane is failing to meet its economic and military objectives. But in a new report, CNAS Non-Resident Senior Fellow Ethan Kapstein suggests that the multinational F-35 exemplifies the complexity of the Pentagon's global acquisition strategy.

The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and Georgetown University co-hosted a major speech by NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen titled "“NATO: Delivering Real Security in an Age of Uncertainty” on the challenges and opportunities – including operations in Afghanistan – for the over 60-year-old Alliance.

The U.S. military officer corps faces an ever-increasing array of challenges. With current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and a complex global environment, the United States is relying on its armed forces to perform a wider variety of functions than any other nation in history.  CNAS’s latest report, Keeping the Edge: Revitalizing America's Military Officer Corps, analyzes the changing nature of military officership and provides recommendations for how the U.S. military officer corps can keep its edge in a new strategic environment.

The Obama Administration's 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) and the Fiscal Year (FY) 2011 budget request sent to Congress today illustrate the challenge of matching vision to reality, according to a new CNAS policy brief released today titled Vision Meets Reality: 2010 QDR and 2011 Defense Budget.

The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) is pleased to announce that its President, Dr. John Nagl, has been named to the independent panel to review the Department of Defense’s 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). 

As the Department of Defense (DOD) prepares to send the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) to Congress, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) today released a working paper by Christine Parthemore and Will Rogers, Promoting the Dialogue: Climate Change and the Quadrennial Defense Review, examining how DOD considered the effects of climate change during the QDR process.

CNAS released today a major report on American power in the sea, air, space and cyberspace: Contested Commons: The Future of American Power in a Multipolar World. The authors advocate a renewed commitment to the global commons by pursuing three objectives: build global regimes that preserve the openness of the commons; engage pivotal actors that have the will and ability to protect and sustain them; and develop the hard-power tools and capabilities necessary for the United States to defend the global commons.

CNAS is pleased to announce the launch of the U.S.-India Initiative co-chaired by Richard Armitage and Ambassador R. Nicholas Burns.  The project will lay a blueprint for the next phase of the U.S.-India relationship and advance growing bilateral ties in areas including security, economics, energy and climate change, and democracy and human rights.