Why the Trump Team May be Worried About a Billion-Dollar Money Laundering Case
As Eric Edelman, the former U.S. ambassador to Turkey, puts it: “Every time it seems things can’t get worse in Turkey, I always say, just wait.”
As Eric Edelman, the former U.S. ambassador to Turkey, puts it: “Every time it seems things can’t get worse in Turkey, I always say, just wait.”
Dr Ross Babbage, who is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, says activities already being undertaken by foreign powers in this country have made the crackdown necessary.
"In past shutdowns, including the longer shutdown in 2013, those people were paid retroactively," Blakeley said. "But there's no guarantee about that until Congress gets their act together and actually passes either a short-term spending bill or ideally a longer-term budget deal."
Thomas Mahnken, president and CEO of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, discusses National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster’s preview of President Donald Trump’s national security strategy, identifies priorities, and more during a Dec. 2, 2017, interview with Defense & Aerospace Report Editor Vago Muradian. The interview was conducted during the 2017 Reagan National Defense Forum, held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California. Our coverage is sponsored by Leonardo DRS.
According to a report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, “In constant dollars, defense spending fell from $768 billion in 2010 to $595 billion in 2015, a decline of nearly one-fourth, and President Obama’s final budget request was for only $583 billion” The report cited defense analyst Katherine Blakely, who has written that the rate of this drawdown “has been faster than any other post-war drawdown since the Korean War at a compound annual growth rate of -5.5 percent.” History will rightly assign the reigning commander-in-chief the lion’s share of the blame, but the so called military spending “sequester” was a bipartisan act that has yet to be reversed.
A May 2016 report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment found that large caliber guns could fire an HVP between 10 and 30 nautical miles at Mach 3, faster than conventional unguided rounds.
The threat of nuclear attack by a great power or a rogue state is a major reason why every U.S. administration since the end of the Cold War has validated the need to maintain a safe, secure, and credible nuclear triad. Russia maintains a large stockpile of nuclear warheads and continues to adhere to military doctrine that indicates it might be willing to use nuclear weapons to coerce the United States and its allies in a crisis. Both Russia and China are funding multiple programs to modernize their nuclear arsenals, and the proliferation of advanced military technologies has allowed North Korea to fast-track its nuclear weapons development program.
For more than two decades, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments has provided consistent, high-quality, and innovative research on defense strategy, budgets, and the security environment. CSBA’s mission today is to promote innovative thinking and debate about national security strategy, defense planning, and military investments, as well as to provide timely, impartial, and insightful analyses to senior members of the executive and legislative branches, the media, and the broader national security establishment to make informed decisions regarding strategy, security policy, and resource allocation.
Dr. Thomas Mahnken, testified before the House Armed Services Committee in a hearing on "Readying the U.S. Military for Future Warfare" on Tuesday, January 30, 2018.
Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator John McCain and Ranking Member, Senator Jack Reed hosted a hearing to explore the U.S. policy and strategy in the Middle East. CSBA Counselor Eric Edelman was invited to give testimony.
Choosing analytic criteria for making strategic choices or judging historical outcomes is a recurring, if not universal, problem. It recurs because no general method for choosing appropriate criteria is known to exist despite the early hopes for methodological innovations ranging from macroeconomic models to operations research, systems analysis, and game theory.
President Trump’s FY 2018 defense budget promises a “historic” defense buildup. At $603 billion in the base national defense budget, some $54 billion over the Budget Control Act caps, it grows the size of military slightly and boosts RDT&E efforts, but doesn’t move the needle on procurement. Does the FY 2018 budget request build the military the U.S. needs? Will Congress succeed in funding more for defense?