CSBA in the News

Kate Blakeley, a defense budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the statement confirms what many people already know behind-the-scenes.

The Navy is nearing the end of a triplet of Future Fleet Architecture studies – conducted by MITRE Corporation, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis (CSBA) and the Navy – to look at how new technologies and concepts may change the size and composition of the Navy in the mid-term. While the Navy has not yet released the details of the three studies, the general consensus is that the future fleet will have to be larger than today’s.

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.