Publications

For more than two decades, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments has provided consistent, high-quality, and innovative research on defense strategy, budgets, and the security environment. CSBA’s mission today is to promote innovative thinking and debate about national security strategy, defense planning, and military investments, as well as to provide timely, impartial, and insightful analyses to senior members of the executive and legislative branches, the media, and the broader national security establishment to make informed decisions regarding strategy, security policy, and resource allocation.

For nearly two decades, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) has provided consistent, high-quality, and innovative research on defense strategy, budgets, and the security environment. CSBA experts have worked to analyze U.S. defense strategy, force structure and planning, and defense budgets in the effort to reconcile these interrelated subjects. CSBA remains instrumental in guiding the nation’s most critical defense policy debates as a small, powerful group comprising experts with extensive experience in the field of national security—many of them military veterans and former senior level policy makers from the Department of Defense, State Department, and the National Security Council—supported by a dedicated staff of accomplished executives and scholars.

The United States is unilaterally divesting itself of its cluster munitions by 2018. It is doing so based on a 2008 policy decision to comply with the Oslo Treaty, which restricts the use of cluster munitions, even though the United States is not a signatory to this treaty.

The battle lines over defense spending in the Trump Administration are already being drawn. Senator McCain has staked out a broad vision of restored readiness, targeted investments in advanced capabilities, and thoughtful growth in military capacity. In this budget brief, CSBA Research Fellow Katherine Blakeley lays out the details of Senator McCain’s proposed defense investments with accompanying interactive visualizations.

The 2017 fiscal year once again began with an interim continuing resolution—the eighth year in a row that Congress has failed to pass a budget for the federal government by the start of the new fiscal year. This continuing resolution maintains the 2016 levels of funding for the Department of Defense (DoD) until December 9, 2016. With the Republicans maintaining control of the House and Senate and taking the White House, increases in defense spending would likely appear sometime after the new Congress and President take office in January. DoD might have a fiscal year (FY) 2017 spending bill in February or March if the defense hawks and the deficit hawks within the Republican caucus can come to terms.

The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments began its analytic work in 1983 as the Defense Budget Project. Its mission was to fulfill an urgent need for research and information on defense policy and budget issues.