CSBA in the News

The Navy is teeing up a number of high-tech projects aimed at boosting the firepower of its platforms, but challenges lie ahead as the service prepares to fight advanced adversaries.

All the measures that would allow CBARS to become a bomber, however, would make it less efficient or more expensive as a tanker. That’s why former Navy Undersecretary Bob Martinage, now at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, was less optimistic. 

Robert Martinage, a former undersecretary of the Navy now with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, says the weapon placement is not a game-changer in and of itself, but “it could be the canary in the coalmine, a harbinger of what’s to come.” If China expands its deployment of advanced defenses, Martinage said, it would have “significant operational implications” for the US and its allies.

Former Navy Undersecretary Bob Martinage was less concerned — for now. “In isolation, the apparent deployment of an HQ-9 air defense system to Woody Island has marginal operational significance,” he told me. “In the event of a conflict, it would pose a limited threat to air lines of communication in the vicinity, but could be quickly overwhelmed and neutralized. In peacetime, US reconnaissance aircraft” — mainly meaning those P-3s and P-8s — “operating within roughly 100 miles will now do so under constant threat, which may reduce crisis stability.”

Even without a Boeing win, the Puget Sound area still may land some work on the bomber, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow and military expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, in Washington, D.C., in an October interview with Puget Sound Business Journal.