Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies on the alternative defense strategy recommendations from Washington’s top think tanks — CSIS, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Center for a New American Security, the American Enterprise Institute and the CATO Institute — during an interview on Oct. 18 with Defense & Aerospace Report Editor Vago Muradian.

The U.S. military is at an inflection point. Unable to remove itself completely from two protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has been forced to respond to a resurgent Russia and a rising China, while remaining ready to combat myriad terrorist threats around the world.

The Air Force hopes to begin fielding an integrated replacement system by the late 2020s, and plans to buy around 600 missiles for just over $50 billion, according to an estimate from Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

“Cyber operations and cyber security is a sustained area of focus for the Pentagon, and they will take advantage of the opportunity to add additional resources to that effort,” Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, told Federal News Radio.

Obama fiscal year 2017 budget calls for $590 billion in Defense spending, including $58.8 billion for overseas contingency operations or war-fighting. Adjusting for inflation, the overall defense budget is down 25 percent from the peak in fiscal year 2010

“What I’m concerned about is having a modernization bottleneck, where you end up with cost growth in one program or several… which is historically very likely… squeezing other programs (with) cascading implications,” said Katherine Blakely. Blakeley and her fellow Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments scholar Jacob Cohn were briefing me and another reporter on their latest study, due out tomorrow...