CSBA in the News

As the Pentagon prepares to unveil its fiscal year 2013 budget request next week, the sequestration beast is back in the news again.

As we barrel headlong toward Monday’s U.S. budget announcement, which will give some guidance as to how the Pentagon plans on achieving $487 billion in budget cuts over the next 10 years (and almost a trillion dollars if sequestration goes into effect), the friendly folks at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments(CSBA) have given us some perspective (PDF) on how that all stacks up, historically.

When Defense Secretary Leon Panetta publicly outlined the 2013 defense budget proposal on Jan. 26, 2012, he revealed a topline Pentagon request – a $525 base budget – lower than last year’s request of $531 billion, but higher than the $518 billion appropriated by Congress for FY 2012. The 2013 request for overseas contingency operations, mostly in Afghanistan, is $88.4 billion, significantly lower than the FY 2012 appropriation of $115 billion; this is mostly due to the Iraq drawdown/…/

A proposed 2013 federal budget plan could set the Defense Department on a path to save $259 billion over the next five years by reducing manpower in the Army and Marine Corps. But the plan is not expected to cause an increase in the use of the Army and Air National Guards, a military analyst said/…/

Barbara Starr interviews Andrew Krepinevich on new U.S. weapons that could help in a conflict with Iran

The Pentagon is taking a crucial first step toward developing a new nuclear-armed cruise missile called the Long Range Standoff (LRSO) weapon, a key component of the Defense Department’s plan to modernize its long-range strike capabilities and ensure it can hit targets in well-defended, hard-to-reach areas such as China and Iran/…/