By PAUL McCLEARY
WASHINGTON — It’s hard to find consensus on most anything in Washington D.C., but four national security-focused think tanks managed to forge something of a rough outline for the future of defense spending.
During a briefing held in the Dirksen Senate Office building on Wednesday, a group of well-known budgetary and strategic thinkers from the four think tanks coalesced around a roughly similar set of options for the Pentagon over the next decade: The venerable A-10 attack plane should be retired, along with the U2 spy plane and the F-18C/D models, while the Navy should lose two to four of its current aircraft carriers.
Hosted by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, the event also featured the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Center for a New American Strategy (CNAS), and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). The effort is the organization’s yearly attempt to game out the options being weighed by the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR).
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