CSBA in the News

What the Army is not studying, Rossi said, is buying anti-ship cruise missiles, which would be an entirely new weapons system rather than a modification of an existing one. That news will be a disappointment, if hardly unexpected, to legislators like House seapower chairman Randy Forbes and thinktanks like the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, which have advocated the US Army get into the shore-based cruise missile business to counter China’s growing navy.

“Many of these proposals have gone as far as they are going to go,” said Katherine Blakeley, a military budget expert with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “People are not going to be as vigorous in advancing personnel reforms as they’ve been in previous years, partly because it's an election year and partly because a lot of these things have been tackled in some way already,” she said. Blakeley also noted the Pentagon's recent decision to open all combat jobs to women.

A $6.7 billion request for military cybersecurity, some of which is to be directed at developing offensive cyber capabilities. Bryan Clark of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments tells me that military brass likely saw how Russia knocked out computer networks in Georgia and Ukraine. A proposal to keep the much-argued-over A-10 ground support plane going until 2022.