CSBA in the News

Tuesday is, quite literally, the end of the line for Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor.After fourteen years in production, the final Raptor was set to roll off the company’s assembly line in Marietta, Ga., completing the truncated run of 187 jets — just a portion of the onetime program of 750 “Advanced Tactical Fighters/…/” With a service life of 30 years and a reputation as the deadliest airborne threat since Zeus, what could possibly happen to the Raptor fleet to force the Air Force to buy more?

U.S. National Guard leaders are making their case to expand their force while the rest of the Defense Department is tightening their purse strings, causing a rift between active-duty and Reserve leaders. Negotiations over shrinking resources have grown tense as Guard leaders — especially those in the Air Force — worry that active-duty leaders have unjustifiably targeted Guard accounts/…/

The failure of the “supercommittee” to reach a deficit agreement is supposed to trigger $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts in federal spending over the next decade, nearly $500 billion of that from the basic Pentagon budget/…/ Besides the nearly $500 billion in cuts that are supposed to start in January 2013, the budget act that created the supercommittee mandated an initial cut of roughly $450 billion in defense spending, spread over the next decade. According to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, that would put basic defense spending for 2013 around $472 billion — about the same, in inflation-adjusted terms, as what was spent in 2007.

As recent events underscore the growing Iranian nuclear threat, the Obama administration appears to be pivoting toward a policy of containment. The emphasis of its rhetoric has shifted from preventing an “unacceptable” nuclear Iran to “isolating” it. When coupled with recent weaker action against Iran, we fear it signals a tacit policy change/…/

Pentagon planners have plenty to deal with these days – Iran in search of nuclear-weapons technology, suicide bombings in Afghanistan, and the final pullout of US troops in Iraq potentially leaving behind a security vacuum in the Middle East. But in war games in Washington this week, US Army officials and their advisers debated three nightmare scenarios in particular/…/

The White House is placing new limits on war spending, making it more difficult for the Pentagon to outmaneuver its new budget caps, according to recent guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Instead, the White House wants the Pentagon to start funding more activities through its base budget, shutting off a potential loophole to the Budget Control Act passed in August/…/ The Senate, in its versions of the defense appropriations and authorization bills, has already made use of this loophole, shifting billions out of the base budget and into the contingency bill, while still complying with the spending caps for 2012.