Bad Idea: Failing to Think on the Margins of the Defense Budget
Defense budgeting discussions frequently feature all-or-nothing thinking. But considering the marginal costs and benefits of additional spending can lead to better spending decisions.
Tag: Defense Spending
Covid-19 Response: Pentagon Gets A Real $8.3B Slush Fund
Mark Cancian analyzes the Pentagon’s share of a $45.8 billion government-wide funding package to help it cope with the disruptions of sickness and quarantine from the COVID-19 virus.
Getting to Less? The Minimal Exposure Strategy
In this brief, the authors discuss a strategy that they have labeled the Minimal Exposure Strategy. The strategy’s core premise is that the United States is largely secure from military threats due to continental U.S. geography and the deterrent quality of its nuclear and other strategic capabilities.
Getting to Less? The Progressive Values Strategy
In this brief, the authors explore a defense approach they have labeled the Progressive Values Strategy. The strategy is grounded in a view that the military instrument is not well suited to meeting many of the security challenges facing the United States. It focuses on achieving a level of military sufficiency that deters adventurism by others—as well as itself.
Getting to Less? Exploring the Press for Less in America’s Defense Commitments
This CSIS Brief is the first in a series that explores the contours and implications of strategies that might reduce the U.S. military’s mission space through greater constraints on its ends, ways, or means.
The Pentagon is moving money to pay for Trump’s border wall. Here are the consequences.
On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper notified members of Congress that he would take $3.6 billion from military construction projects to build 175 more miles of wall along the U.S. border with Mexico.
Goodbye Sequestration, Hello Deficits: How the Budget Deal Sticks Our Children with the Bill
The new budget deal adds $1.6 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years, a bill the current generation has no intention of paying and which it happily sends to its children and grandchildren.
Mark Esper is About to Put Every Pentagon Program Manager Through the Wringer
Esper will likely conduct a “night court” process for DoD, which means that every program will need to be justified in terms of the national defense strategy’s reorientation towards great power conflict.
What Comes after the ‘Last Supper’?
On June 10, 2019, Raytheon and United Technologies Corporation announced plans to merge into a new company, Raytheon Technologies, in the first half of 2020.
The Cycles of Defense Acquisition Reform and What Comes Next
Since peak defense funding periods do not always align with periods of war, it is not the dynamics of war alone that drive cyclical United States defense budgets but a mix of phenomena that includes economic cycles.