CSBA in the News

Republican lawmakers are using increasingly sharp rhetoric to argue against additional cuts to defense spending, warning the military will cede its technical edge, manufacturing will further erode and conscription will return/…/Republican lawmakers are not alone in using sharp language. Industry executives say their firms likely would soon lack the work to retain an ability — and workforce — to design new combat systems. For instance, James Albaugh, Boeing’s commercial aviation chief, told reporters last month that there could soon come a time when few weapons manufacturers have the in-house engineering brainpower to design a new combat aircraft from scratch.

The White House has directed the Pentagon to reduce its 10-year spending plan by another $25 billion, on top of the roughly $450 billion it’s already planning to cut, according to three government officials/…/The Office of Management and Budget directed the action because the White House decided to protect Veterans Administration medical funding from cuts, said one the officials/…/

Just how bad would sequestration be for the Pentagon? No one argues that the roughly $500 billion across-the-board defense cut that would be triggered if the super committee fails to agree on a plan to reduce the nation’s deficit by at least $1.2 trillion equates to a worst-case scenario for the department. But the extent of the damage that could be done to the military with a cut of that size is a topic that is still up for debate/…/

Adm. Mike Mullen and the man who replaces him Friday as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are just five years apart in age but their experiences are different in ways that represent a dramatic shift at the top of the nation’s armed forces.

The number of Air Force bombers and transport planes will shrink dramatically, military families will suffer, and Texas will especially feel the pain if Congress doesn’t agree on overall budget cuts, according to a Republican report.The reason is that if the overall cuts aren’t made, automatic reductions in military spending kick in/…/

Here’s another gem from that recent study on the defense industrial base — or rather the prospective lack of it — by the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Instead of tracing weapons’ cost growth over time, the folks at CSBA have simply divided each warbird’s fly-away cost (the cost of the plane, minus R&D and assorted other expenses) by how much it weighs, to come up with its cost-per-pound in today’s dollars. “Cost-per-pound may better capture the increasing information and electronic content (computers, software, navigation equipment, displays, sensors, electronic countermeasures and so forth) of modern weapon systems,” the study says. (That, of course, explains why a new iPhone costs $1.2 billion.) Surprise: the newest planes are the most costly, even after wringing out inflation’s impact.