CSBA in the News

Turmoil, fear and a certain resolute grimness marked this week at the Pentagon and Capitol Hill. The military scrambled to cope with a range of new threats as Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and the Pentagon leadership begin to grapple with the grim future posed by the automatic budget cuts known as sequestration. Put it all together and you have a military in turmoil, as the four services prepare to battle for missions and budget dollars, while our nation’s senior leaders at the White House, State Department and Pentagon grope for clear strategic direction in a highly unpredictable world.

The U.S. Air Force should leverage its existing secure satellite communications capabilities to create a new class of service that fills the gap between protected and unprotected systems, says a new report by a think tank here.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s July 31 Pentagon briefing on the results of his Strategic Choices and Management Review were grim, but some of the options he did not discuss could be even worse for the Navy and Marine Corps, according to a team of experts from four national security think tanks who met Aug. 1 with Pentagon officials who had conducted the review, commonly known as SCMR.

A day after the Pentagon outlined the stark choices it confronts due to looming budget cuts in coming years, top defense officials pressed Congress to give them the time and flexibility to make the reductions without undermining security.

Automatic budgets cuts will force the Pentagon to slash its ranks or trash its plans to buy new weapons, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced Wednesday.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Wednesday laid out options for implementing the Pentagon’s share of broad spending cuts known as the sequester, including shrinking the Army from 490,000 under current targets to a force as small as 380,000—far below even its modern low point at the end of the Clinton administration/…/