“This is likely to become more the norm in an era with constrained budgets,” Tom Mahnken, president and CEO of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, told Bloomberg BNA. “It is laudable, but can be a challenging thing to do.”Mahnken noted two instances in which it would have been nearly impossible to predict the O&S costs of a particular system: the B-52 and B-1 bombers.
If you want to know what’s up with the Pentagon’s nearly 80 MDAPs or “major defense acquisition programs,” you need to check out the SARs, the unclassified “selected acquisition reports” submitted to Congress to support the Obama administration’s fiscal 2017 budget request as well as the FYDP, the “future years defense program” that runs through 2021. It’s a daunting task, but lucky for the you, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments has done the heavy lifting with its handy “Weapon Systems Factbook” available online.
Congress has appropriated $119 billion for U.S. missile defense projects, including ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California, deployable THAAD interceptors, and radars, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
The MV-22 is also key to this new concept. Its ability to deliver forces hundreds of miles from a host ship could enable, for example, forces to fall in on an existing missile battery or establish advanced bases in multiple locations across an archipelago like the Philippines, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments who previously served as special assistant to the chief of naval operations and director of his Commander’s Action Group…
Compiling the most recently publicly released SARs and a few other estimates, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) published the “Weapons Systems Factbook.” CSBA projects that the Pentagon's top programs will need $321 billion for the Future Years Defense Program (spanning FY 2017 to FY 2021) plus an additional $410 billion in FY 2022 and beyond.
The next U.S. president will inherit a security environment in which the United States confronts mounting threats with increasingly constrained resources, diminished stature, and growing uncertainty both at home and abroad over its willingness to protect its friends and its interests. Revisionist powers in Europe, the western Pacific, and the Persian Gulf—three regions long considered by both Democratic and Republican administrations to be vital to U.S. national security—are seeking to overturn the rules-based international order.
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