SIMI VALLEY, CALIF.: “I don’t how we buy it back without a real bloodbath,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham. “It” is the $500 billion, 10-year cut to defense spending imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011, popularly (mis)called sequestration. Graham, one of Donald Trump’s harshest critics in the GOP, is not alone in thinking the… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The odds keep getting better that Donald Trump will ask for a big boost to defense spending in a supplemental request soon after his inauguration. But who gets how much for what? That raises a whole host of unanswered questions, experts and policymakers made clear today at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.… Keep reading →

No one has done a better job of predicting the final outcomes of deals on the defense budget since sequestration was made law than Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute. So we asked her to predict what this election will mean to the 2018 defense budget. With the election tomorrow, we couldn’t think of a… Keep reading →

Throughout this presidential campaign, the candidates have barely discussed the most important elements of national security, the United States’ armed forces. We’ve tried to flesh things out, with the excellent force structure and budget analyses done by Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Analyses. But Mark had to work with very few… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Can the Pentagon afford its Third Offset Strategy? From anti-ship missiles to artificial intelligence, the military is experimenting with a host of high-tech systems  to counter increasingly sophisticated Russian and Chinese forces. That effort is essential, said the Defense Department’s procurement chief, but there’s one problem: If we want to go beyond experiments and… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Whoever is elected the next president of the United States must stand ready for crisis to strike “at 12:01 on January 20th,” the Secretary of the Navy warned today, lest America’s adversaries see a window of opportunity. What Ray Mabus and his fellow service secretaries didn’t say, at least out loud, speaks volumes. With Russia meddling in… Keep reading →

The verdict from think tanks and commentators is in: Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), the much-criticized war funding account, should move to the base budget because of abuses and a lack of transparency. As a matter of theory, such a move would be good government. OCO deflects hard choices and distorts the budget process. In the… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Today, we got a very clear look at the biggest problem with sequestration for the military. If the Budget Control Act goes into full effect, the heads of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines told the Senate Armed Services Committee today, they will not be able to protect the United States as they are… Keep reading →

When Donald Trump discussed his defense program in Philadelphia on Wednesday, the bluster and lunacy of the primary season were gone and he offered a scripted position paper that reflected (mostly) mainstream Republican ideas. There is still lots one might disagree with, but the discipline of the teleprompter meant that he read a staff-prepared paper that put… Keep reading →

It’s no news to Breaking Defense readers that the U.S. military faces a readiness crisis. But retired Gen. David Petraeus apparently disagrees. Yes, the military’s budget has been cut by 25 percent in real terms since 2011—much of it coming from accounts used to maintain and build combat readiness. Yes, leaders from the Army, Navy,… Keep reading →