As articulated in their respective long-term shipbuilding plans, the Navy and the Coast Guard intend to spend more than $47 billion combined over the next 20 years to purchase a total of 83 small combatants. Of that number, the Navy plans to purchase 53 littoral combat ships (LCSs), in addition to the two that were purchased in 2005 and 2006. The LCSs will be built using two different hull designs-one, a semiplaning monohull; the other, an aluminum trimaran-although the exact mix of hulls has not yet been determined.1 The ships will carry one of three sets of equipment, or mission packages,...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are remotely piloted or self-piloted aircraft that can carry cameras, sensors, communications equipment, or other payloads. The Department of Defense has used UAVs in military operations since the 1950s because they can provide reconnaissance, surveillance, and intelligence of enemy forces without risking the lives of an aircrew. In recent years, interest in the many capabilities of UAVs has been growing among the armed services. At the same time, the services have been having difficulty actually acquiring and deploying the UAVs they have tried to develop. As a...

Today's Navy numbers about 285 battle force ships (a category that includes aircraft carriers, submarines, surface combat ships, amphibious warfare ships, and various support vessels). Recently, the Navy indicated that it needs a fleet of 313 ships to perform all of its missions. Building and sustaining such a force, however, would require greater budgetary resources over the next three decades than the Navy has received in recent years. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the Navy would have to spend an average of about $21 billion per year (in 2007 dollars) on ship...

The U.S. Army plans to spend about an additional $34 billion in 2013 dollars to develop and purchase a new armored vehicle for its infantry, the Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV). The GCV is supposed to operate across the full range of potential conflict types while providing unprecedented levels of protection for the full squad of soldiers it will carry. To achieve the Army's goals, the GCV would weigh from 64 to 84 tons, making it the biggest and heaviest infantry fighting vehicle that the Army has ever fielded-as big as the M1 Abrams tank and twice as heavy as the Bradley, the Army's current...

In coming decades, the aging of the population, rising health care costs, and the expansion of federal subsidies for health insurance will put increasing pressure on the federal budget. At the same time, by 2020, if current laws generally remained in place, federal spending apart from that for Social Security and major health care programs would drop to its smallest percentage of total output in more than 70 years, and federal revenues would be a larger percentage of output than they have been, on average, during the past 40 years.1 Still, the rising cost of Social Security and the major...

In its most recent review of U.S. nuclear policy, the Administration resolved to maintain all three types of systems that can deliver nuclear weapons over long ranges-submarines that launch ballistic missiles (SSBNs), land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and long-range bombers-known collectively as the strategic nuclear triad. The Administration also resolved to preserve the ability to deploy U.S. tactical nuclear weapons carried by fighter aircraft overseas in support of allies. Nearly all of those delivery systems and the nuclear weapons they carry are nearing the end of...