CSBA in the News

“Any low-hanging fruit has gone away, at the very least,” says Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense think tank. Blakeley points out that housing allowances were never intended to simply be bonus cash for troops, even if many soldiers now use them that way. BAH was originally intended to cover only about 80 percent of a soldier's housing costs, she said—it's now designed to cover 99 percent [5]—and the Senate's changes are an attempt to make such stipends “a little more true to what their purposes are. If you want troops to be able to have $400 in their pocket more every month, a better way to do that is to look at the actual pay.”..

The LRS-B is intended to “manage” China in a future conflict, said Andrew Krepinevich, a defense policy analyst [and former] President of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments…

Some have suggested that the Marine Corps should have purchased newer F/A-18E and F Super Hornets as a stopgap measure, but that would have slowed the service’s procurement of F-35s, putting even more stress on its Hornets and AV-8B Harriers, said Jesse Sloman, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments think tank in Washington. 

“It’s lower hanging fruit, (but) it’s also an acknowledgment of the growing threat,” said Mark Gunzinger, a retired Air Force officer and laser expert at the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), which co-sponsored the conference with Booz Allen Hamilton. “It’s not a fad,” Gunzinger told reporters. “It’s based on where the community sees the threat going and the potential for direct energy to actually have effects against those kinds of systems.”..

“Frequently repositioning forces across a base cluster could induce an enemy to dilute its strike salvos over a larger area and possibly waste weapons on false targets,” Mark Gunzinger and Bryan Clark wrote in a May report for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a national security think thank.

Treating land-based missile defense in a completely different way could alter the character of military strategy in the Asia-Pacific and certain other important global theaters, according to recent studies by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA).