DoD to request $622.6 billion for 2008
Posted : Friday Feb 2, 2007 20:31:47 EST
The Pentagon is expected to send Congress a $622.6 billion defense budget for 2008. The sum includes $141.7 billion to continue fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The numbers were confirmed by a Pentagon official Feb. 2.
The spending plan, to be delivered to lawmakers Feb. 5, is $6.2 billion more than the $616.4 billion the Pentagon is spending this year. But there are greater differences in the budget than those numbers alone suggest.
Basic “peacetime” spending for 2008 is set at $481.4 billion, up from about $440 billion approved for 2007. Peacetime spending is how much it costs each year to keep the U.S. military going — pay and train troops, buy and maintain weapons, conduct exercises and deployments. War costs are extra.
And there’s a substantial drop in war costs. The Pentagon wants $163.4 billion to fight the wars during 2007. The 2008 request is $21.7 billion less.
At about the same time the 2008 request goes to Capitol Hill, the Pentagon is expected to ask for $93.4 billion more in emergency war funding for 2007. That is slightly less than the $99.7 billion called for in a December draft of the supplemental.
The budget figures, closely held by the Pentagon, were first reported by Bloomberg news service.
With war costs included, defense spending in 2008 would be higher than it has been since World War II, said Steven Kosiak, director of budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA).
If the requested total is not cut by Congress, the 2008 budget will mark 10 years of robust growth in military spending. The current run-up began in 1999, when the budget was $276.2 billion.
There is a growing sense in Congress, now controlled by the Democrats, that defense spending cannot continue its decade-long ascent.
“Half the discretionary budget goes into defense. We can’t keep adding to the top line,” said an aide to a senior House Armed Services Committee member. “We’re going to have to start making some choices.”
It’s not getting easier.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported Feb. 1 that the Pentagon’s estimate of $5 billion to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq may be understated by a factor of two or almost three. Sending support troops along with the combat troops is expected to push the cost to $9 billion to $13 billion, the CBO said.
To accommodate that, Congress will have to consider “cutting back, delaying or deferring new weapons to ensure that the people on the ground over there have the equipment they need,” the aide said.
The defense budget is not expected to call for eliminating — or even seriously trimming — any of the military’s major weapon programs. But lawmakers might as they weight war costs and their desire to bolster spending on domestic programs.
Potential Targets
The most vulnerable program is probably the Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS), defense analysts agree.
FCS calls for building 18 separate systems — manned and unmanned ground and air vehicles — that are linked to one another through an electronic communications network.
Soldiers in the vehicles and on the ground would be fed volumes of information about where the enemy is on the battlefield.
But many of the systems exist at this point only in concept. And FCS, estimated in 2003 to cost $92 billion, ballooned to $161 billion last year.
Moreover, the Iraq war may be casting doubt on the FCS concept, said Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project.
Sensors and the network were supposed to give U.S. troops such a precise picture of the battlefield that U.S. troops could kill or avoid enemy forces. Old fashioned equipment such as heavy tanks would be unnecessary.
But it hasn’t worked out that way in Iraq, where U.S. technology has been largely unable to detect and defeat “improvised explosive devices” cobbled together by insurgents, Wheeler said.
“FCS will be messed around with,” Wheeler predicted, but possibly not until after 2008.
The Joint Strike Fighter is another program likely to face cuts, although it may survive unscathed in 2008. The multiservice, multicountry plane is a budget-cutter’s target because that’s where the money is. At $276 billion, it is the most expensive weapon program ever.
The JSF will almost certainly be “scaled back significantly” over the next six years, Wheeler said.
Supplemental Scrutiny?
For short-term cuts, look to the 2007 emergency supplemental. Under rules set by Gordon England, deputy defense secretary, last fall, the services were permitted to include requests in the supplemental for spending not directly related to the two wars.
Thus the $93.4 billion request is expected to include money for such items as Joint Strike Fighters, research-and-development projects and Army modularization.
House and Senate Appropriations Committee members have promised intense scrutiny of the emergency supplemental request.
“They’re going to scrub the hell out of it and all kinds of things are going to fall out,” the House aide said.
Cost-consciousness in Congress may trigger a new a new era of rivalry among the three U.S. services for money, manpower and modernization.
For several decades there has been an unspoken truce among the services that has prevented any service from trying to gain budget share at the expense of another, said Kosiak. Now that truce may be in jeopardy.
For example, Congress seems sympathetic to an Army and Marine Corps request for 92,000 extra troops, and that makes the Navy and Air Force “very, very nervous,” said Robert Work, director of strategic studies at CSBA.
In recent years, the Air Force and Navy have been cutting troops to make more money available for new weapons. Now they fear the money they save from troop cuts may be diverted to add troops to the Army and Marine Corps.
Troop increases are expected to cost about $8 billon in 2008 and $58 billion over the next six years, according to Cindy Williams, a principal research scientist in the Security Studies Program at MIT.
Williams contends that even the massive new budget the U.S. military has prepared will fall some $30 billion short of paying for all of the weapons, additional troops and operations it has planned.
It is an “unrealistic budget” because big as it is, it does not cover the cost of all the Pentagon is planning to do, said Williams, who is a former assistant director of the CBO’s National Security Division.
By Sean D. Naylor - Staff writer
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