CSBA in the News

If the effort lines up with the how the Navy plots its ship and aviation needs “this is a good idea,” Bryan Clark, a naval analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and former aide to retired former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert, told USNI News on Wednesday…

It’s a wasted opportunity to think of unmanned systems as simply substituting for manned ones, agreed Mark Gunzinger, a retired Air Force colonel now with the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments. “Yes, the size of many of the DoD’s forces, such as its combat air forces, have been cut to unacceptable levels,” Gunzinger told me. “(But) it’s not about ‘getting the numbers up,'” he argued. It’s about the synergy between manned and unmanned systems, each doing things the other can’t.

Andrew Krepinevich, [distinguished senior fellow] of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, compares what China calls a “peaceful rise” strategy to the Soviet Union's attempts to “Findlandize” Europe. “If the [military] balance shifted in Moscow's favor, America's European allies might conclude that Moscow could not be resisted and would fall under Soviet sway.

As 2016 draws to a close, Navy Leadership is in possession of a great deal of Blue-ribbon thinking about fleet architecture and force structure, the result of Congressional direction contained in the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and elsewhere.  Specifically, the Rand Corporation has submitted a study of the future of Aircraft carriers, and three separate  organizations (The Mitre Corporation, the Navy Staff (N81), and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) have submitted views of appropriate future fleet architectures. 

We should also drastically pull back the EDCA, reducing rotations of the Seventh Fleet, and giving access to just one base far away from population centers and croplands. And US assistance should focus on marine surveillance aircraft, anti-ship coastal defenses, and anti-aircraft systems, the A2/AD gear recommended by Washington think tank Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Jacob Cohn of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments on the newest edition of their Strategic Choices Tool