CSBA in the News

The Pentagon is playing its cards close to the vest on the issue of military retirement and compensation reform.

The Defense Department has yet to figure out how much funding currently routed through overseas contingency operations accounts will have to be folded back into the base budget once U.S. forces return from Afghanistan, according to officials.

Despite the concerns about the budget law’s caps, defense spending could go lower still. That’s the message of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment’s Todd Harrison in a new report, “Chaos and Uncertainty: The FY 2014 Defense Budget and Beyond.” Harrison writes that the budget caps may be “more of a ceiling than a floor in the coming years.” He sketches what he calls a worst-case but still plausible scenario of the currently unfolding drawdown going deeper than the law now stipulates but just as deep as past U.S. postwar drawdowns have gone, particularly in certain key areas such as personnel and procurement. The details are in the document, but the upshot is this: defense spending could decline more than the 34 percent (compared to the fiscal 2010 baseline) that the budget control law lays out; instead, it could drop as much as 51 percent in real terms.  The administration’s best choice, Harrison argues, is to accept the prospect that lower–maybe much lower–budgets may be coming and to plan accordingly. The alternative, he says, is to let the reductions arise in an ad hoc way (See “Quote of the Day” below). But the Pentagon and defense advocates in Congress have instead chosen to push for the most they can get and have found themselves adjusting on the fly–not strategically–to the reined-in fiscal reality. Not only are budget requests and spending and authorizing bills not reflecting the likely downturn in spending (even to the budget control act level) but also there is not even official planning for the leaner budget scenarios. Harrison points out that the Pentagon’s worst-case of three possible budget assumptions in this year’s Strategic Choices and Management Review was, in fact, the current budget caps/…/

A Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments analyst predicts that defense budget may drop as much as $415 billion if sequestration remains in place over the next decade, Aviation Week reported Friday.