CSBA in the News

After more than eight months of fighting and a total of 26,089 sorties — including 9,618 strike missions — by NATO aircraft and ships, Col. Moammar Gadhafi is dead and the Libyan rebels appear firmly in charge of the North African nation.For military strategists one of biggest questions to emerge from the Libyan civil war is whether or not Odyssey Dawn — the official name for the operation — is a new template for Western military intervention.

Would troops prefer the promise of Tricare for Life health care coverage or a cash bonus of $5,500 for every year they serve on active duty?

Five Air Force Pave Hawk helicopters are parked or landing in the high desert east of Tucson, Ariz. They are transporting victims of a mock earthquake as part of a training exercise called Operation Angel Thunder.

On the chopping block: a perfectly good aircraft carrier, a handful of aging cruisers, four of the Navy’s 14 ballistic-missile submarines and another 5,000 sailors beyond expected cuts over the next five to 10 years.

Upcoming spending cuts are likely to end the custom of splitting DoD’s budget pie evenly among the Air Force, Navy and Army — and it’s the ground force that’s most likely to wind up with a thinner slice/…/ “You’re going to make decisions both on force structure and modernization programs, based on your strategic judgments, and that doesn’t lend itself to a one-third, one-third, one-third” split, Lynn said.

/…/Just like General Motors and many other previously labor-intensive businesses, the Pentagon has a labor cost problem. And just like Corporate America, the solution to the Pentagon’s labor cost problem will be the substitution of new weapons for soldiers, in an attempt to get more national security output per troop. The Army and the Marine Corps, the most labor intensive of the services, should brace for the bad news to come/…/