There is a tendency “of calling anything that is high tech or anything that involves an advanced capability as part of the third offset strategy and that’s either to say we are not funding it enough or look the investments aren’t really panning out and just painting with a really broad brush as to what the third offset strategy really is,” Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments told Federal News Radio.
But, when you whittle down investments to the few categories the strategy is really about, DoD is only investing about $1 billion of its more than $600 billion budget in the third offset.
The third offset is “going to be relatively small investments over the near term … for cumulatively $12 [billion] to $15 billion of investment over the next five year,” Blakeley said.