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Security, stability of Asia-Pacific region in best interests of Australia
Ross Babbage, a former senior defense official and founder of the Kokoda Foundation which enjoys a close relationship with the Australian Department of Defence, once called upon Australia to completely reconfigure its defense strategy in order to deter China or in his previous parlance to prepare to "rip an arm off" China.
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Hawks, Pentagon, industry brace for effects of ‘dreaded’ stop-gap defense budget
A stop-gap budget is likely to tie Pentagon's hands financially and create an accounting headache, said Katherine Blakeley, research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
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Guest essay: US guided missile warships in a dangerous demolition derby in Asian Pacific
Naval analyst Bryan Clark, of Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, states, “As the total number of ships operating over the last decade has gone down, the operational tempo has remained the same or increased. Fleet training has been reduced 20 to 25 percent over the last decade. There is a systemic problem overall that the surface Navy is getting worked a lot harder than its been designed to do.”
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Watchdog: Navy Ships Involved in Deadly Collisions Were Missing Certifications
Katherine Blakeley, a defense budget expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said Congress has appropriated increasingly more money for readiness since 2009.
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President Trump, Republicans Still Face Defense Spending Showdown
The president's fiscal 2018 budget request is $52 billion above the budget-control cap. The request is also three times more than the average amount by which Congress has been able to raise caps in the past. The unreconciled House and Senate budgets are about $90 billion above defense caps, according to Katherine Blakely, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA).
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U.S. Navy Ships in Fatal Collisions Not Properly Certified
But the certification reports suggest that the U.S. Navy may have knowingly sent ships to sea that weren’t fully certified for the missions they were conducting, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
“This appears to be endemic of a systemic problem,” Mr. Clark said. The Seventh Fleet destroyers and cruisers “may not have had sufficient practice to do the difficult transits they were doing,” given the crowded waters they operate in.