CSBA in the News

Sustaining robust U.S. leadership will mean making some tough strategic choices. Americans will have to rank core U.S. interests in order of priority; determine an affordable size for hard- and soft-power instruments (the armed forces, the diplomatic corps, foreign aid); rethink the forward presence of U.S. forces and the current alliance structure; and more carefully weigh the risks of action versus inaction in response to an endless list of global crises. “Our security challenges are growing in scale and shifting in form even as our resources decline,” says Andrew Krepinevich, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. “If that’s not a call for rethinking our national strategy, I don’t know what is. There’s an old military adage that if you try and be strong everywhere, you are strong nowhere.”

The Pentagon says threatened budget cuts will invite aggression, endanger national security and devastate its operations/…/Panetta told senators in a letter this week that after a decade of the threatened cuts, the U.S. would have the smallest ground force since 1940, the smallest number of ships since 1915 and the smallest Air Force ever.But it’s not about the numbers, according to Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Greater firepower and tonnage make today’s naval fleet smaller but more powerful, he said

White Sands Missile Range was the site of the first atomic-bomb test in 1945. Now the Army is using the New Mexico complex for a different kind of test: to see if it can get more bang for its buck/…/ The Army’s Cold War-era approach of long-term weapons-development programs saw a string of high-profile failures in the past decade. In a report this year, the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments noted several multibillion-dollar equipment programs that never led to the fielding of any new items, including Comanche, a stealth helicopter effort that cost $7.9 billion, and Crusader, a $2.2 billion investment in a self-propelled artillery system.

The Navy will place arming its fleet of Fire Scout drones with a modified Hydra rocket, heralding a new era in unmanned combat for the service.