News

But Kate Blakeley, a defense budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, told Inside Defense that the current OCO budget has enough built-in "slack" to accommodate Obama's new troop policy. "The additional marginal costs of about 2,500 troops in Afghanistan would be quite small compared to the $41.7 billion requested for Operation Freedom's Sentinel in Afghanistan in FY-17," she said. "The FY-17 OCO budget request already is largely a continuation of FY-16 OCO funding levels for Afghanistan."..

Kate Blakeley, a defense budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the CBO study demonstrates that the Pentagon's O&M budget lacks transparency. "The growth of O&M costs is one of the more vexing budget problems that DOD faces," she said. "With half of O&M costs effectively a black box, DOD needs to get a handle on its escalating O&M costs, which are crowding out procurement and other spending. 

“It used to be that AGIs would deploy regularly off their ports and we would encounter them and they would operate very safely and professionally — mostly looking for signals intelligence,” Bryan Clark, a naval analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and former aide to retired Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert, told USNI News...

The three "fleet architecture" studies are being completed by the office of the chief of naval operations' assessment division (N81), the MITRE Group and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, respectively. Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at CSBA who is leading the fleet architecture analysis, said the three studies will inform the Navy's new Force Structure Assessment (FSA), which lays out the number of ships the Navy needs...

“We’ve been out to the labs, we’ve seen the technology at a classified level, and we’ve come to the conclusion independently, as have others in the DoD, that the technology is ready,” said Mark Gunzinger, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments...

"Any low-hanging fruit has gone away, at the very least," says Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense think tank. Blakeley points out that housing allowances were never intended to simply be bonus cash for troops, even if many soldiers now use them that way. BAH was originally intended to cover only about 80 percent of a soldier's housing costs, she said—it's now designed to cover 99 percent [5]—and the Senate's changes are an attempt to make such stipends "a little more true to what their purposes are. If you want troops to be able to have $400 in their pocket more every month, a better way to do that is to look at the actual pay."..