CSBA in the News

Todd Harrison, from the non-partisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, cautioned Pentagon officials need to be careful with their dire rhetoric.

The Diplomat’s editor Harry Kazianis spoke with Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment Senior Fellow Mark Gunzinger concerning Sequestration and its possible effects on America’s pivot to Asia.  

Too bad Chuck Hagel wasn’t at the Brookings Institution on Friday when a panel of national security experts discussed a solid agenda for the next secretary of defense.

Under sequestration, the Pentagon faces $1 trillion in cuts over the next decade, $45 billion just in the remaining months of this fiscal year. The across-the-board cuts affect every branch of the military—everything from contracts, to fixing ships, to training troops. But Hagel isn’t without options.

The main problem with the sequester is not the size of the cuts to the defense budget, but rather the across-the-board way they are administered, according to Todd Harrison of the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.

With the automatic budget cuts known as sequestration set to start taking effect March 1st, we’re going to see a lot of interesting last-minute plays to stop them. It’s almost certain none of them will work. But Rep. Randy Forbes’s bill introduced this morning, H.R. 773, at least offers the virtue of simplicity: At the stroke of a pen, it would erase half of the sequestration cuts — about $50 billion this year, $600 billion over a decade — those that apply to the Department of Defense.