The Trump defense budget takes significant steps to move from a focus on regional conflicts and counter-insurgency to a focus on great power conflicts. But the Army, Navy Air Force and Marines clearly are struggling with this balance.
Trump’s pick to replace Sec. Jim Mattis will be a key indicator about where the president wants to drive the department — and the confirmation process will show what the Senate will accept — while the defense budget may be collateral damage from a bitterly divided Congress.
We have been here before. In 1982 Caspar Weinberger and David Stockman had a similar showdown referred by President Reagan. DOD won that time. What does that have to tell us about the impending Mulvaney–Mattis showdown? And if OMB wins this time, would Mattis stay on?
WASHINGTON: The Democrats’ recapturing the House means three major impacts on the Defense Department: The odds are that controversial Trump priorities like new nuclear weapons and a Space Force will go nowhere, defense budgets will go down, and oversight will go up, up, up. Program winners and losers The most likely losers are nuclear modernization…
Trump’s plan would undercut the more expansive National Defense Strategy for “great power competition” that embattled Defense Secretary Jim Mattis rolled out just nine months ago.
Now that President Trump has signed the fiscal 2019 defense appropriations bill — marking the first time in nine years that defense is not bound by a Continuing Resolution — the broad trend was cuts to Operational and Maintenance (O&M) to fund Research, Development, Testing, & Engineering (RDT&E). The top line was consistent with the…
Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson announced “the Air Force we need”, a significant expansion of the Air Force from 312 operational squadrons to 386. One thing is clear. It will be really expensive. The annual additional cost would be about $37 billion at a time when budget projections show no increase, and up to 94,000 additional personnel, active and reserve.
Most coverage of the annual defense policy bill has focused on program changes: more ships (including six icebreakers!), no change to F-35’s, more RDT&E, no JSTARS recap, a growl (but no more) on ZTE, and many more (the bill and report run 2,500 pages). Less discussed, but of more import in the long run, are the…
When House Armed Services Chairman Thornberry proposed eliminating seven agencies and reducing personnel by 25 percent, he faced strong opposition. In the HASC’s draft bill, he scaled the proposal back to eliminating just three agencies. But that didn’t work either. During the committee’s markup of the House defense policy bill, members still pushed back.
It’s not often the public gets to — or chooses to — weigh in directly about what the defense budget should be. The folks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies gave anyone interested enough a chance to do just that. Read on to see what Mark Cancian, a member of our Board of Contributors, says about the results! The Editor.
The National Defense Strategy, released this morning, may be the single most important document penned by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. It encapsulates the Trump Administration’s defense policies in one place for the first time and provides guidance for the 2019 defense budget, to be released in a few weeks. That budget will mark the administration’s…
We’re partnering with the Center for Strategic and International Studies to bring you their fab Bad Ideas series through the Christmas holiday season. They produced three today. This is the second. Mark Cancian, also a member of the Breaking Defense Board of Contributors, pens a fine piece…
The defense community is abuzz with talk of strategy and force expansion as the Pentagon develops the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy. Talk is nice but, as budgeteers like to say, “If it ain’t funded, it ain’t”. Building the forces the services say they need—with the readiness and modernization to support them— requires large budgets,…
The competition for Warfighter Training and Readiness Solutions will bring together training networks, combat training centers and live ranges across the DoD enterprise.
The competition for Warfighter Training and Readiness Solutions will bring together training networks, combat training centers and live ranges across the DoD enterprise.
The Trump defense budget takes significant steps to move from a focus on regional conflicts and counter-insurgency to a focus on great power conflicts. But the Army, Navy Air Force and Marines clearly are struggling with this balance.
By Mark Cancian