Events

The U.S. military needs to “offset” the investments that adversaries are making in anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities—particularly their expanding missile inventories—by leveraging U.S. advantages in unmanned systems and automation, extended-range and low-observable air operations, undersea warfare, and complex system engineering and integration. Doing so would allow the United States to maintain its ability to project power, albeit in novel forms, despite the possession of A2/AD capabilities by hostile forces. This is the central argument of a new CSBA report by Senior Fellow Robert Martinage, Toward a Third Offset Strategy—Exploiting U.S. Long-Term Advantages to Restore U.S. Global Power Projection Capability.

On November 18, 2014, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments hosted a congressional discussion sponsored by Senator Tammy Baldwin and Representative Reid Ribble to discuss a new operational concept to guide evolution of the U.S. surface force.

“DoD’s current method for resourcing readiness starts with the wrong metrics, lacks experimental data to isolate causal effects, and does not have a continuous feedback loop to update and refine readiness theories and models.  The military could be significantly overfunding or underfunding readiness without knowing it.”                                                              

The U.S. Department of Defense is one of the largest organizations in the world, managing global security responsibilities with numerous international allies and partners. What does it take to fund DoD? Where does that money go? How is DoD coping in the current fiscal environment? What gaps exist between the strategy outlined in the Quadrennial Defense Review and the capabilities funded by the latest budget request?

The debate on how to sustain a strong defense in the era of evolving threats and shrinking budgets has been stymied by the political impasse on Capitol Hill and the series of foreign policy crises that have preoccupied the defense officials and legislators.

On May 1, 2014, CSBA hosted a congressional event where Rep. Adam Smith, the Ranking Member of the House Armed Services Committee and Todd Harrison, Senior Fellow and Director of Defense Budget Studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) offered a roadmap for prioritizing the Pentagon’s budget.