CSBA in the News

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.

Kate Blakeley, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Studies, states in a Jan. 24 report that “reaching anything near that level of spending would require broad political consensus” that has been lacking in Congress for years and points out that the “average relief” provided by lawmakers since the BCA began is only $18 billion.

That's where “the rubber meets the road,” said [Katherine] Blakeley, research fellow at Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “The Budget Control Act of 2011 is still the law, and it needs to be amended by the regular legislative process, which means you need at least some democratic buy-in.”