CSBA in the News

The administration is in a tight spot with this budget, said defense analyst Katherine Blakeley, of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The administration will have to “walk a narrow rhetorical tightrope in justifying this budget, rather than the higher spending envisioned in the 2016 request,” she said. Although the fiscal year 2017 budget will be right at the level of the BCA caps, the Pentagon’s 2018-2021 budget plan will exceed the caps by a cumulative $104.5 billion.

John Stillion, a former RAND analyst and contributor to the 2008 war game and the 2011 paper, wrote a paper [10] for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington, D.C., think tank, proposing that the Pentagon’s next fighter should be the size of a bomber and carry 24 air-to-air missiles while also controlling drones hauling their own missiles…Stillion’s proposal were hints that the arsenal-plane concept was gaining legitimacy in military circles. But the first arsenal plane could be a fighter rather than a bomber.

 …Meanwhile, an August 2015 study by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments found that upgrading and maintaining the US nuclear force posture will cost more than $700 billion over the next 25 years.

There is a tendency “of calling anything that is high tech or anything that involves an advanced capability as part of the third offset strategy and that’s either to say we are not funding it enough or look the investments aren’t really panning out and just painting with a really broad brush as to what the third offset strategy really is,” Katherine Blakeley a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments told Federal News Radio.

The US Army must play a larger role in the Pacific to deter China, one of DC’s leading defense experts is telling Congress today. That larger role requires politically and fiscally difficult decisions to build new kinds of units and base them in new places, Andrew Krepinevich told me in advance of his Capitol Hill briefing. The core of Krepinevich’s vision: Army missile batteries — for anti-air, anti-ship, missile defense, and long-range strike — regularly deploying to, or even permanently based in, West Pacific nations.

Jan van Tol, a senior fellow at another Washington think tank, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said that operating from bases on Palawan would put U.S. forces close to the disputed Spratly Islands, where China has been reclaiming land and building airfields and other facilities. “More visits to the Philippines means more ships in the South China Sea,” he said in a telephone interview Tuesday.