This week on “Fed Access”, Katherine Blakeley, research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, joins host Derrick Dortch to talk about her new report: “Seven Areas To Watch In The FY17 Defense Budget“.
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.
The Pentagon didn't get everything it wanted for 2017 in the President's budget proposal. But it got a lot: $524 billion in the base, plus another $59 billion for overseas contingency operations. It's a mix of cost-cutting reforms and investments in what the brass sees as five strategic challenges. Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, joined Federal Drive with Tom Temin to offer his insight.
Last month’s release of the 2016 Marine Corps Aviation Plan highlighted the service’s struggles to keep its planes flying and its pilots trained. Lt. Gen. Jon Davis, the deputy commandant for aviation, stated in the report’s introduction that the Corps has seen “a decrease in flight hours per month per aircrew and an uptick in [its] mishap rates,” leading to concerns about the readiness of Marine squadrons.
“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.
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