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.
A glimpse of what could lie ahead, if the next president continues the projects begun by the Obama Pentagon, came in a provocative 2014 study, “Toward a New Offset Strategy,” by Robert Martinage of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
He also mentioned the studies launched by the service branch, Mitre Corp. and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis on a new fleet design as well as the Navy’s plan to increase surface ships’ offensive capabilities.
“The Navy and Marine Corps are pursuing capabilities to implement their Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment concept, which reflects the shift the Marine Corps is making away from large-scale amphibious assaults with amphibs and the Maritime Prepositioning Force and toward more distributed, smaller-scale amphibious operations,” said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
How to insert autonomous systems into the fleet is indeed one of the subjects of debate, says naval analyst Bryan Clark, of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Clark and other outside experts have participated in a series of “fleet architecture studies” led by the office of the chief of naval operations. Their findings will shape decisions on how to size and organize the future fleet.
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