CSBA in the News

The number of aerial drones with combined strike and surveillance capabilities, such as General Atomics’ Reaper, will more than triple over the next decade, according to the U.S. Defense Department’s 2011 Aircraft Procurement Plan.

Last week was the deadline for industry to respond to the Army’s request for information regarding humvee recapitalization proposals/…/ Dakota Wood, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, recently told ITA that he believes recapitalization will become a popular option for military leaders and lawmakers who want to push for cheaper modernization. “Recapitalization  is the name of the game these days, and i think the services will push in this direction even more as the nation’s fiscal realities become harder to ignore or to kick further down the road through creative bookkeeping,” he wrote in a May 19 email. “As the defense budget comes under more pressure, the services will be pressed to extend the utility of what they already have. I think this will be a significant issue once Mr. [Leon] Panetta takes the helm, at Defense.”

The Army recently ordered 177 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected All-Terrain Vehicles with additional underbody armor kits from Oshkosh Defense to address the number of vehicles that have been damaged in the Afghan theater, according to the MRAP program office/…/Dakota Wood, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the M-ATV’s armor order trend indicated that forces in Afghanistan continued to encounter improvised explosive devices that were getting more and more deadly. “I’m not surprised to hear that M-ATV’s are needing supplemental armor,” he wrote. “Military officials have been talking about the expected uptick in violence as the ‘Spring fighting season’ develops. U.S. forces would seem to be experiencing an increased level of IED attacks, with these attacks matching or exceeding the original capabilities of the M-ATVs sent over in the first wave or two.”

Commercial satellite and space firms are hoping the Pentagon’s increasingly tight budgets will translate into more business as military officials seek faster and cheaper options.

Troops on foot patrol in Afghanistan are finding an increasing number of makeshift bombs before they explode, helping to defuse the effectiveness of the Taliban’s No. 1 weapon, military data show.

After a decade of steady expansion, the Chinese military has made significant strides toward limiting the United States’ ability to deploy its own armed forces in the western Pacific. A combination of new submarines, long-range anti-ship missiles and heavily-armed jet fighters underpins what the Pentagon calls Beijing’s ‘anti-access, area-denial’ strategy, aimed at keeping the warships of the US Seventh Fleet, based in Japan, out of the South China Sea. ‘Reversing the erosion of the Navy’s strike advantage will require investments in a new generation of capabilities to increase the range, persistence and survivability of carrier aircraft,’ Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington, D.C. think tank, posited in a September report. ‘Without such investments, US aircraft carriers will be locked into a concept of operations that is dependent on relatively benign, permissive operating conditions.’