CSBA in the News

The drop from the Pentagon’s fiscal 2011 war-spending request of $159 billion reflects President Barack Obama’s plan to reduce troop levels in the war zones and stricter White House rules on what costs can be included in the war budget, said the officials, who asked that their names not be used because the budget has not been formally released. “That’s the largest year-to-year decrease in total war funding since” the Afghan war began, Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst for the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, said in an e-mail. “The bigger question here is what does this indicate in terms of strategy?” Harrison said. “With a year-to-year reduction in war funding of this magnitude, it appears to signal an intent to continue the withdrawal from Iraq and to begin reducing troops levels in Afghanistan during fiscal 2012,” he said.

The Air Force’s current bomber force lacks the capabilities to penetrate contested airspace and strike targets in future air campaigns, according to Mark Gunzinger, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington-based bipartisan think tank. “Pentagon planners viewed long-range strike as a first day capability that would be needed to help rapidly halt invading enemy forces,” he told ISN Insights. “After that, short-range tactical aircraft flying from nearby bases in relatively permissive operating environments could carry out the majority of strike missions.”

Making the bomber nuclear capable will only raise the development price tag “a handful of percentage points,” according to retired Air Force colonel Mark Gunzinger, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense who is now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. “That seems like a pretty wise investment . . . considering that this aircraft could be around 30-40 years,” he said in a Jan. 18 telephone interview. “To build in that kind of mission flexibility makes great sense both from a strategic perspective as well as a fiscal perspective.”

Because of pressure to contain defense spending, the Marine Corps must return to its reputation that it can get “a great return on the investment dollar” to ensure that the service holds on to its procurement budget, said Dakota Wood, a retired Marine and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The escalating costs of the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, along with current problems with the Marines’ version of the F- 35 jet fighter, have “tarnished that reputation of an affordable service,” Wood said in a phone interview. “In the past, the Marine Corps has enjoyed the reputation of just asking for what it truly needed.”

“I think that there are going to be more and more examples like that,” said Todd Harrison, a defense analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Because the military in recent years invested in many new programs, which in lots of cases have not come to fruition, it did not spend as much on large-scale repair and modernization of older equipment, Harrison added. “As a result, we still have . . . this lagging need to recapitalize large parts of our force,” he said.