Publications

With the United States now engaged in military operations against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), there are many questions regarding the cost, duration, and scope of these operations. This CSBA Backgrounder provides a range of estimates for the cost of military operations against ISIL to date and how much these operations may cost over the coming months.

Each year, the Department of Defense (DoD) submits a Selected Acquisition Report (SAR) to Congress detailing the status, plans, and funding requirements for more than 80 major acquisition programs. The most recent SAR, submitted in December 2013, projects funding and quantities for major acquisition programs extending more than 30 years into the future. The SAR projects these programs will need $324 billion over the Future Years Defense Program (FYDP), spanning FY 2015 to FY 2019, and an additional $498 billion in FY 2020 and beyond.

The U.S. Department of Defense is one of the largest organizations in the world, managing global security responsibilities with numerous international allies and partners. What does it take to fund DoD? Where does that money go? How is DoD coping in the current fiscal environment? What gaps exist between the strategy outlined in the Quadrennial Defense Review and the capabilities funded by the latest budget request?

“DoD’s current method for resourcing readiness starts with the wrong metrics, lacks experimental data to isolate causal effects, and does not have a continuous feedback loop to update and refine readiness theories and models.  The military could be significantly overfunding or underfunding readiness without knowing it.” - Todd Harrison, Strategic Studies Quarterly, Fall 2014 issue

This backgrounder discusses the balance the FY15 defense budget attempts to find among compensation, force structure, modernization, and readiness, and compare the choices made in this budget to the Joint Think Tank exercise CSBA hosted with three other think tanks in early February 2014.

As the government reopened after the October 2013 shutdown, and defense got a three month reprieve before sequestration would go into effect for 2014, Todd Harrison offered his forecast at what's next for the defense budget.