CSBA in the News

President Obama announced earlier this year the need for about $400 billion in military-related budget cuts over the next decade.

In his waning days as secretary of defense, Robert Gates is proposing historic changes to what he calls a “rigid, one-size-fits-all approach” to military pay and retirement benefits/…/

The surge of troops sent to Afghanistan encountered soaring numbers of bombs hidden in paths and roads over the last year — and a corresponding jump in casualties. But as insurgents increased their use of these simple and inexpensive homemade weapons, international forces patrolling on foot became far better at finding them, the latest Pentagon figures show. The makeshift bombs, which the military calls improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, cause most of the injuries and deaths of international forces in Afghanistan/…/ “There is an ever-present, constantly evolving competition between those who make and emplace IEDs and those who must find and neutralize them. As one side develops a technique, the other side accounts for it and modifies its approach to regain the upper hand,” said Dakota Wood, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a retired Marine lieutenant colonel. For instance, to stump metal detectors, insurgents make bombs with little or no metal.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates in January proposed a five- year spending plan with $78 billion of net savings from canceling some programs, reducing troop numbers and cutting overhead. Republicans backed Gates’s goal in a budget plan that passed the House in April./…/Gates’s proposed reduction represents about 2.5 percent of Pentagon spending over five years and is little more than a “light cut,” said Todd Harrison, a defense analyst with the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment research group in Washington.