CSBA in the News

Extending the deployment of the Harry S. Truman strike group by just one month could end up costing the government tens of millions more dollars because of the inefficiency caused by shifting plans, one analyst said. Bryan Clark, a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said that extending a carrier's time at sea could raise costs by creating more wear and tear on the ship.

There is a tendency “of calling anything that is high tech or anything that involves an advanced capability as part of the third offset strategy and that’s either to say we are not funding it enough or look the investments aren’t really panning out and just painting with a really broad brush as to what the third offset strategy really is,” Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments told Federal News Radio.

We ran Forbes’ statement by Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington-based think tank that examines national security and defense spending issues. Clark estimated that between 2025 and 2030, China will have 80 to 100 submarines. With the U.S. having more than 50 submarines at that time, Forbes’ numbers have validity, Clark said. But we need to consider more than numbers when comparing the two nations’ submarine fleets, Clark added. He noted all U.S. subs are nuclear-powered, while China’s fleet, in a decade, still will contain many diesel-powered vessels. “It is notable, however, that all of the U.S. submarines are highly capable of long endurance, whereas about half of China’s submarine fleet will be non-nuclear submarines best suited for regional operations close to home,” Clark wrote in an email.

Indeed, when it comes to negation of important missile defense investments, the above mirrors an interview I conducted back in 2014 with experts from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA). When I asked them about the utility of US missiles defenses against hypersonic weapons they explained: “Defensive missiles have very limited time and a finite amount of energy available to position themselves to intercept an incoming offensive missile.

Bryan Clark, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments said the strain on the fleet is inevitable until Enterprise’s replacement, the first-in-class carrier Gerald R. Ford, comes online.“You either have to accept presence gaps or long deployments,” he said “And it’s going to be that way until the Ford enters the fleet.”

In the US, a much-discussed report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, written by former Pentagon submarine expert Bryan Clark, has raised serious questions about the ability of submarines to retain their underwater stealth in the face of “technological advancements, many of them driven by rapid increases in computer processing power”.