The House Budget Committee has postponed introducing its own FY17 budget until March in order to rally support from House Republicans skeptical that the president’s current budget request does not allocate enough spending for defense. Is the current White House defense budget request in fact sufficient? Who won, who lost, and where will Congress look to modify the budget?
As posture hearings begin this week, AEI’s Mackenzie Eaglen and Rick Berger break down the numbers and compare the president’s actual 2017 defense budget request to the president’s planned 2017 budget request as projected in the 2016 budget:
Given the gap between Mr. Obama’s planned request and the actual 2017 request—plus the new requirement to pay for needed technological leaps—the budget’s…payers are many. They include Navy and Army aviation programs, the new Air Force bomber and airlift, and many small reductions spread across hundreds of line items in the modernization accounts, including procurement and research, development, test, and evaluation (RDT&E). Proposed future spending changes little, remaining $113 billion above the existing Budget Control Act caps from 2018 through 2021 and $424 billion below the level of spending anticipated by Secretary Robert Gates in 2012—the last realistic budget prepared by the Pentagon.
Eaglen and Berger also address the “Third Offset” strategy, an attempt to offset shrinking U.S. military force structure and declining technological superiority, in the 2017 budget.
So what are the specifics of the Third Offset strategy in next year’s budget? There is a combination of small new-start research programs, “black” work in the classified world, and significant accelerations of existing developmental programs. The total investment in this new strategy is $18 billion over five years, with over $3.5 billion being spent in 2017. Over $6 billion of all money shifted to the third offset will be spent on classified programs…The key to understanding offset investments is that it’s not only the many experiments and small bets being placed by the Secretary’s Strategic Capabilities Office. It is also a massive acceleration of dozens of programs that constitutes a significant shift in internal funding priorities.
To schedule an interview with Mackenzie Eaglen, please contact AEI Media Services at mediaservices@aei.org or 202-862-5829.
For an examination of the current state of the US military, check out AEI’s recently released State of the US Military: A Defense Primer (referenced in Chairman Mac Thornberry’s February Views and Estimates letter to Chairman Tom Price) here.
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