CSBA in the News

After years of building up the military’s presence in Afghanistan, some contractors are now helping the military move out.

The Pentagon is putting its new weapons cost-cutting strategy to its first big test as it negotiates with Lockheed Martin over the price of the next batch of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters (JSF).

Nixon, Ford, and Carter aren’t anyone’s three favorite presidents. But defense policymakers today could learn something from how they handled the hard times of the 1970s: They shifted costly security burdens to foreign partners while pulling US forces out, and they cut defense budgets generally while protecting long-term investments in “seed corn” technologies that would pay off later, like stealth then or robotics now.

The Defense Department in its last two budget requests identified $238 billion in “efficiencies” that could help it spend less through 2017, but it is a mistake to call them savings, analysts from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments said.

The U.S. Navy is betting $42 billion on a new class of aircraft carriers, the world’s biggest and costliest warships ever, even as the Pentagon budget shrinks and China and Iran arm themselves with weapons to disable or destroy the behemoths.

Three years after then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates cancelled the sprawling FCS program — the Army’s ambitious attempt to build a brigade’s worth of high-tech equipment, from light tanks to drones to computer networks, under a single contract — the Army and industry are still thrashing out the final bill, with a final proposal from lead contractor Boeing not due until September 30th/…/