CSBA in the News

“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.

Kate Blakeley, a defense budget analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said “these POMs and the FY-18 budget build are a draft for the next administration, but they have to be a good draft. I expect DOD to draft a baseline consensus budget, and laying out specific additional options and areas for the administration's decisions.”

[Michael] Vickers has seen about as much covert action as Jack Bauer from Fox’s hit show 24. But Vickers has also been able to do something Bauer’s anti-authority streak never quite allowed to happen: Rise to the highest levels of the U.S. counterterrorism leadership structure.