CSBA in the News

But Bryan Clark of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments also thinks DoD needs to go further in its reforms. One of the biggest critiques of Carter’s agenda was the lack of acquisition reform. Carter said he wants to change the DAB, which provides a senior advisory role on acquisition decisions and he wants to reduce some paperwork requirements. Clark said that overlooks one of the main acquisition issues in defense, which is the development of requirements for new weapons.

The military services think they have a dilemma. A tidal wave of costly strategic nuclear modernization programs are bearing down on the defense budget over the next couple of decades, just when the services and members of Congress are anxious to take advantage of a now-rising defense budget to buy additional conventional (or, non-nuclear) military hardware.

The Marine Corps's current Amphibious Assault Vehicle, the 1970s-vintage AAV-7. Japan will buy the US Marine Corps’s current Amphibious Assault Vehicle. Then there’s the possibly China might simply sink the ships before any Japanese troops can land. “My concern there is they’re getting too close to the flame,” said Andrew Krepinevich, former longtime president of the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments, who’s had many conversations with Japanese policymakers.

Behind the scenes, briefing papers published by intelligence agencies and think tanks, whose reports are rarely if ever mentioned in the national press or on the evening news, tell a different story, one hinted at by the decision of Russia not to send representatives to the summit. One study, published earlier this year by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, is entitled “Rethinking Armageddon: Scenario Planning in the Second Nuclear Age.”

While in open conflict, the fixed position of the islands would make the missiles easy targets but the weapons could have a coercive effect to China’s neighbors and U.S. operations in peacetime, Bryan Clark, naval analyst Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) and former special assistant to past Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert, told USNI News on Wednesday. “In a conflict, the islands will be hard to defend, but their value is in curtailing U.S. peacetime operations and in the opening moves of a conflict when they can threaten U.S. forces with a surprise attack,” he said. “If the U.S. deployed similar forces to Palawan [in the Philippines], it could similarly impact [People‘s Liberation Army] operations.”