News

Dr. Thomas G. Mahnken, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, told VOA that while there is an effort by the Chinese to exert control over the South China Sea and treat it like Chinese airspace, it's important to acknowledge that pilots do sometimes make mistakes

A new naval future fleet architecture study from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) suggests that the United States Navy will need to develop a dedicated air superiority fighter to counter Russian and Chinese advances.

“Counter-air operations will require low observable manned fighters with an unrefueled combat radius of more than 500 nm,” the CSBA report states. “These characteristics will keep refueling aircraft out of range of enemy air defenses while enabling the fighters to reach and engage bombers in a dynamic environment inside the enemy’s air defense envelope.”

Since the Cold War, the U.S. Navy has followed a well-worn template to deter aggression and respond to crises in the Middle East and the Western Pacific: a “one size fits all” carrier strike group and amphibious ready group. This approach won’t do the job any longer. China and Russia are violating international law and threatening U.S. allies even as ongoing operations in the Middle East are consuming the service lives of the Navy’s ships and aircraft. In response, the Department of Defense has deployed Navy and Marine forces longer and more frequently, creating what Navy leaders are calling a readiness crisis in the fleet. This is exacerbated by a reduction in the fleet’s size from 318 ships in 2000 to about 275 ships today.

The CSBA does not recommend the U.S. abandon its carrier-centric force altogether, but says the Navy needs to focus more on submarines and calls for a resurgence of the surface fleet. The report also calls for a new smaller carrier-sized ship.

The Pentagon and the U.S Navy must increase submarines, strengthen the surface fleet size and build new smaller, more agile carrier-type ships -- as as part of a broader effort to rethink the way it constructs the American fleet for future conflicts and operations, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment (CSBA) contends in a just-released report. 

The Navy needs a bigger fleet of smaller ships than envisioned in its official Force Structure Assessment, says a congressionally-chartered study from the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments.

CSBA emphatically agrees with the Navy that the focus needs to shift from day-to-day counter-terrorism and presence operations to deterring (and if need be, fighting) major wars. Both plans call for a steep increase in attack submarines from 55 today to 66, along 12 nuclear-missile submarines. But CSBA recommends distinctly different surface fleet — one with many similarities to proposals from Senate Armed Services chairman John McCain.

The average cost (from 2008 to 2013) to deploy a soldier in Afghanistan was $1.3 million per year, according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. So a reasonable estimate for 25,000 troops to enforce a safe zone for a year is $32.5 billion.