This identifies the key challenge we face in Defense budgeting: we’ve been so used to having growing budgets that the process of making wise strategic choices has atrophied.

Barry Watts, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment and former head of PA and E, said part of the reason the US faces these grim choices — beyond the onerous financial situation — is that the nation has lost the capacity to make clear and effective strategic choices.

The whole article is worth your time.

While we struggle with the immediate challenges before us, we ought to think about how to grow strategic thinkers for the future to rebuild our capacity to make clear and effective strategic choices.

Gen Cartwright on the context for the upcoming defense budget decisions:

As examples, Cartwright said the threat cycle for cyber attacks is 14 days and for Improvised Explosive Devices it is roughly 30 days. So our systems and architectures must adapt and get inside these cycles, he said. On a more strategic level, Cartwright said the US must fundamentally change its approach to costs. Weapons systems must impose greater costs on our potential and current enemies than they do on the US. “We have to impose costs on them, not on us,” he said.

A key strategic challenge for us right now is getting ourselves back on the right side of the cost-imposing strategy ratchet.

Joe Buff at DefenseTech offers a scenario to explain the mysterious collision between UK and French SSBNs in February:

Scenario for the UK/France collision: The two boomers may have been practicing sub-on-sub combat maneuvers, including the classic close-trail so well dramatized in “Hunt for Red October.” Would two boomers ever fight in a real life war situation? Oh yes! It’s public info that SSBN crews train hard so that, if they ever do have to launch their missiles, they and their sub can then stay immediately useful and relevant by switching over to the attack as an ersatz SSN, to go on the hunt for enemy SSBNs. (Their extreme quiet, powerful passive sonars, and heavyweight anti-sub torpedoes make them decent platforms in that role.)

In addition, it’s public info that to save money and maximize utility of all navy assets, SSBNs while transiting to and from their patrol areas will sometimes serve as “training targets” for anti-submarine forces. Either of these situations could account for why the Royal Navy and French SSBNs were so close together to begin with that they collided while submerged. Statistically speaking this seems more likely to explain it, rather than a totally random encounter against astronomical odds under the high seas.