January 20, 2015
SOTU: Paul Scharre on the Defense Budget
The State of the Union will come shortly before the President's Budget is released to Congress, and the President should take this opportunity to reach out to Congress and show a willingness to work with them to lift the sequester and sufficiently fund the U.S. military. Military expenditures have come down significantly since their wartime peak and should not be allowed to grow unconstrained, but the sequester has been harmful and hurts military readiness and modernization. The Department of Defense needs the flexibility to allocate resources within the Department, as well as the ability to make hard choices on key defense programs. The President should also signal his desire to work with Congress on difficult issues to restrain military spending, including compensation reform and another round of base closures.
More from CNAS
-
How to Make the U.S. Military Weak Again
Commentary
No-first-use, or the idea that the United States should not use nuclear weapons unless first attacked with them, has gained traction everywhere from the House Armed Services C...
By Brent Peabody
-
Friday Roundtable Podcast: Sep. 13, 2019
Podcast
On this Roundtable episode of the Defense & Aerospace Report Podcast, our guests include Bob Hale, former Pentagon comptroller and senior fellow at the Center for a New Americ...
By Robert F. Hale
-
Trump's cancelled peace talks with the Taliban
Video
Christopher D. Kolenda is a retired US army colonel, and a veteran of the Afghan war. He also played a key role in facilitating peace talks with the Taliban. He tells Deutsche...
By Christopher D. Kolenda
-
Two Cheers for Esper’s Plan to Reassert Civilian Control of the Pentagon
Commentary
The longest-ever gap in civilian leadership atop the Department of Defense came to an end on July 23, when Mark Esper was sworn in as secretary of defense. His presence in the...
By Loren DeJonge Schulman, Alice Hunt Friend & Mara Karlin
