By Mark Cancian, Monday, March 25, 2019 7:01 AM
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.
// Marcus Weisgerber and Patrick Tucker If there’s been one theme at the Pentagon since Donald Trump became president, it’s a desire to move fast, particularly when it comes to buying new weapons. The changes are necessary, officials argue, to keep pace with Russia and China, the two countries singled out as “great power” competitors in last year’s National Defense Strategy. Defense leaders urged Congress to allow the Pentagon to remove layers of bureaucracy in order to buy and develop new weapons faster.
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By Rick Berger & Mackenzie Eaglen, The National Intererst: “President Donald Trump’s latest budget merely keeps the military treading water."
(Breaking Defense) The US keeps losing, hard, in simulated wars with Russia and China. Bases burn. Warships sink. But we could fix the problem for about $24 billion a year, one well-connected expert said, less than four percent of the Pentagon budget.
By Connie Lee, National Defense Magazine: “The Navy is leveraging rapid acquisition authorities provided by Congress to push out new weapons faster."
// Marcus Weisgerber Money to extend border barriers and lavish use of the war fund are already drawing bipartisan fire.
// Kori Schake
The Trump administration has delivered its behemoth $4.5 trillion budget. Even if one accepts the 3 percent GDP growth the administration anticipates (which neither the Federal Reserve nor the Congressional Budget Office does), the plan would not produce an end to the deficit profligacy that is a yawning vulnerability for America’s national security. Even its calculations see deficit spending continue for more than a decade while interest rates magically remain unaffected. There is no averting our eyes: We Republicans have become the party of fiscal insolvency.
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Mackenzie Eaglen | AEIdeas
The good, bad, and ugly of the latest request shows five key issues for policymakers to address this cycle.
James C. Capretta | RealClearPolicy
The primary value of most presidential budgets is political, and this one is no different.
For all the talk of major changes, the Pentagon is pouring money into some pretty traditional priorities.
By Lani Kass, Monday, March 18, 2019 7:01 AM In 2006, a relatively obscure book caused a major stir among the U.S. Air Force leadership. Why Air Forces Fail, edited by Robin Higham and Stephen J. Harris, lays out the determinants of failure: deficiencies in the industrial base, misguided technology and tactical picks, inattention to logistics and neglect of training. The case studies are broken…