CSBA in the News

The deadline for submitting budgets to OSD is Thursday, the senior defense official said, adding that the Navy's will not incorporate the cuts. Ultimately that means that Carter's budget wonks will have to do the cutting themselves and the Navy may not like what they decide to cut, said Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments… 

Congress “expresses a significant hesitation and reservation about the impact of DIUx and whether it’s structured to actually affect what it says it’s going to effect. There has been a considerable strain of skepticism among members of Congress that DIUx is organized and structured and has the right plan that it promises can bring new entrants to the defense market to the table and then most importantly that it can actually deliver on bringing new technology where it matters, which is to the warfighter,” said Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Good evening, listeners! We have another excellent episode for you this week as our host, Richard Aldous, welcomes Hal Brands to the show to talk about American grand strategy.

But Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, says not all companies can diversfy equally. Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, for example, still mostly serve the Pentagon, but Boeing has a “pretty robust” commercial sector to offset a drop in defense sales.

“Trump promised to grow the military … and end mandatory budget caps, but did not address other specific initiatives or how to pay for them,” said Bryan Clark, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, who calls the mandatory spending limits imposed by sequestration “the most significant and pervasive institutional challenge DoD faces today.”