CSBA in the News

Even before it was formally submitted as the Annual Long-Range Plan for Construction of Naval Vessels for Fiscal Year 2016, a draft of the Navy’s latest shipbuilding plan was floating around Washington and being seen by defense commentators as likely to have a short shelf life. 

IOC “can’t come soon enough” for the Marine Corps, said Jesse Sloman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

If China ever attacked Taiwan, psyops—and, more specifically, the Gaoxin-7 planes—would probably play a major role in the fighting. The PLA “would likely seek to broadcast disinformation and propaganda across Taiwanese military networks, spreading confusion and encouraging Taiwanese troops to desert or surrender,” Jim Thomas, John Stillion, and Iskander Rehman wrote in a 2014 report for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Defense analyst Evan Montgomery, of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the world is now in the midst of a “second nuclear age,” one that is arguably more complex and potentially more volatile than the bipolar U.S.–Soviet struggle of the Cold War.

Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow with the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, has crunched the numbers, and says the U.S. now accounts for 73 percent of all NATO defense spending. But part of that, Blakely says, has to do with America's superpower status and its unmatched military might. “The United States also has a very broad set of core global national interests that many of the European NATO countries don't necessarily share.”