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The Factbook is divided by categories of weapon systems: aircraft, air and missile defense, communications and electronics, ground systems, missiles and munitions, nuclear forces, shipbuilding, and space systems. The aircraft category is the largest among these, both in terms of the number of programs and the total funding projected. It includes fixed-wing, rotary-wing, and manned and unmanned aircraft for all four Services.
The dashboard also includes cost estimates from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments for projects that haven’t yet been designated as major programs that require SARs.
Congress appropriated $12.5 billion last year for the first 40 E-2D models; the Pentagon is requesting another $9.5 billion for 35 more new Hawkeyes in future years, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan policy institute.
Another day, another market-moving tweet from the future President of the United States. This time the target was defense contractor Lockheed Martin, and its F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. In the tweet, President-elect Trump called the F-35 program and its cost, “out of control” and pledged to save billions of dollars in military and other spending once he takes office. Shares in Lockheed and other defense contractors promptly dropped. But fixing concerns with the F-35 program is no easy task.
Congress “expresses a significant hesitation and reservation about the impact of DIUx and whether it’s structured to actually affect what it says it’s going to effect. There has been a considerable strain of skepticism among members of Congress that DIUx is organized and structured and has the right plan that it promises can bring new entrants to the defense market to the table and then most importantly that it can actually deliver on bringing new technology where it matters, which is to the warfighter,” said Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Last month, I participated with my colleagues Jerry Hendrix and Elbridge Colby in a strategic choices exercise hosted by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments where we built an alternative 10-year budget for the Department of Defense. We assumed up front that a new Administration was able to achieve a budget deal with Congress that resulted in stable funding, a prerequisite for getting the Department of Defense back on its feet, but assumed only modest budget growth.
That’s the bottom line of a study I produced along with several colleagues as part of “Developing Alternative Defense Strategies 2016,” an exercise organized by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, where groups from five think tanks used CSBA’s “Strategic Choices” software to reimagine the U.S. military budget.
