CSBA in the News

“This year’s Sea Breeze exercise is definitely a signal to Russia,” 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. “It is in part to demonstrate to Russia that U.S. and NATO forces will still operate adjacent to Russian territory and forces despite Russia's protests. 

A new report from a Washington think tank highlights current and future challenges facing defense spending, while the GOP-dominated Congress is expected to continue a bitter budget battle with Democrats and the White House when lawmakers return from summer recess next month.

“What I’m concerned about is having a modernization bottleneck, where you end up with cost growth in one program or several… which is historically very likely… squeezing other programs (with) cascading implications,” said Katherine Blakely. Blakeley and her fellow Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments scholar Jacob Cohn were briefing me and another reporter on their latest study, due out tomorrow…

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments with close ties to the Navy, said that without the F-35C, the service knows it is lacking the ability to fight inside heavily defended airspace. “They just have a challenge in countering IADS, particularly since the Navy doesn't yet have a 5th generation aircraft and their aircraft will still lack the ability to operate from the range where the carrier can be survivable in the early phases of a conflict,” Clark said.