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Demands On The Marine Corps Are Slowly Breaking Marine Aviation
Last month’s release of the 2016 Marine Corps Aviation Plan highlighted the service’s struggles to keep its planes flying and its pilots trained. Lt. Gen. Jon Davis, the deputy commandant for aviation, stated in the report’s introduction that the Corps has seen “a decrease in flight hours per month per aircrew and an uptick in [its] mishap rates,” leading to concerns about the readiness of Marine squadrons.
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Pentagon Signals an End to Cuts for Military Pay and Benefits
“Many of these proposals have gone as far as they are going to go,” said Katherine Blakeley, a military budget expert with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “People are not going to be as vigorous in advancing personnel reforms as they’ve been in previous years, partly because it's an election year and partly because a lot of these things have been tackled in some way already,” she said. Blakeley also noted the Pentagon's recent decision to open all combat jobs to women.
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The Future of Defense: Software?
A $6.7 billion request for military cybersecurity, some of which is to be directed at developing offensive cyber capabilities. Bryan Clark of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments tells me that military brass likely saw how Russia knocked out computer networks in Georgia and Ukraine. A proposal to keep the much-argued-over A-10 ground support plane going until 2022.
Analysis
Protecting the Homeland – The Future of Missile Defense
On February 9, RealClearPolitics hosted an event which examined the future of missile defense in the U.S. How do we protect from the increasing threats from Russia, Asia and Iran? What are the best ways to combat the vastly different existing threats, including cruise range missiles, long range missiles and the Russian counter missiles? What innovations and technologies will help us protect our homeland and defend our allies? CSBA’s Mark Gunzinger participated in one of two panel discussions.
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Obama’s Last Defense Budget Under Fire From All Sides
The administration is in a tight spot with this budget, said defense analyst Katherine Blakeley, of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The administration will have to “walk a narrow rhetorical tightrope in justifying this budget, rather than the higher spending envisioned in the 2016 request,” she said. Although the fiscal year 2017 budget will be right at the level of the BCA caps, the Pentagon’s 2018-2021 budget plan will exceed the caps by a cumulative $104.5 billion.
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The U.S. Air Force’s Master Plan to Outgun China
John Stillion, a former RAND analyst and contributor to the 2008 war game and the 2011 paper, wrote a paper [10] for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington, D.C., think tank, proposing that the Pentagon’s next fighter should be the size of a bomber and carry 24 air-to-air missiles while also controlling drones hauling their own missiles...Stillion’s proposal were hints that the arsenal-plane concept was gaining legitimacy in military circles. But the first arsenal plane could be a fighter rather than a bomber.