An August report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), a non-partisan Washington, D.C., think tank, outlined areas in which the Pentagon could save money when upgrading the nuclear-weapons system.
“With communications advances and long-range surveillance and precision weapons, ground units today have a lot more firepower and can be a lot more effective than their predecessors 50 years ago,” said Clark, now an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.
The directive in Carter’s memo to downselect from two vendors to one in fiscal year 2019 is “perhaps the most disruptive aspect of the decision,” [Bryan] Clark said.
Regarding China's fifth-generation fighter program, Jesse Sloman and Lauren Dickey underscore that “engines are a critically important component of any fighter aircraft…. [W]ithout a reliable, high-performance turbofan engine to power them,” the fifth-generation fighter program “will be crippled.”
Kate Blakeley, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments who used to work at the Congressional Research Service, weighed in. “Sounds like they will couple topline discretionary numbers — possibly lower than the budget deal of 2015 — with a menu of proposals to cut mandatory programs — Social Security, Medicare, etc. Probably reprising frequent pitches like raising the eligibility age for [Social Security],” she wrote in an email…
Bryan Clark, a maritime analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), said that while a high frequency radar on the island could have some law enforcement value – like similar radars the U.S. uses to detect drug runners in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean — it’s likely an HF radar on Cuarteron has a secondary military use to detect stealth aircraft.
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