Trump ramps up budget for military, Pentagon

WASHINGTON — It’s the biggest budget the Pentagon has ever seen: $700 billion. That’s far more in defence spending than America’s two nearest competitors, China and Russia, and will mean the military can foot the bill for thousands more troops, more training, more ships and a lot else.

And next year it would rise to $716 billion. Together, the two-year deal provides what Defence Secretary Jim Mattis says is needed to pull the military out of a slump in combat readiness at a time of renewed focus on the stalemated conflict in Afghanistan and the threat of war on the Korean peninsula.

The budget bill that President Donald Trump signed on Friday includes huge spending increases for the military: The Pentagon will get $94 billion more this budget year than last — a 15.5 per cent jump.

It’s the biggest year-over-year windfall since the budget soared by 26.6 per cent, from $345 billion in 2002 to $437 billion the year after, when the nation was fighting in Afghanistan, invading Iraq and expanding national defence after the 9-11 attacks.

The extra money is not targeted at countering a new enemy or a singular threat like alQaida extremists or the former Soviet Union. Instead the infusion is being sold as a fix for a broader set of problems, including a deficit of training, a need for more hi-tech missile defences, and the start of a complete recapitalization of the nuclear weapons arsenal.

Every secretary of defence since 2011, when the Congress passed a law setting firm limits on military and domestic spending, has complained that spending caps set by the Budget Control Act were squeezing the military so hard that the number of ready-tofight combat units was dwindling.

Aging equipment was stacking up, troops were not getting enough training and the uncertain budget outlook was clouding America’s future.

“I cannot overstate the negative impact to our troops and families’ morale from all this budget uncertainty,” Mattis said just hours before the House and Senate approved the deal.

More money for the Pentagon, however, is not the simple solution some might think. Even with the spending caps of recent years, the defence budget has been robust by historical standards. Todd Harrison, a defence budget specialist at the Center for Security and International Studies, says military funding has been near the inflation-adjusted peak levels of the armed forces buildup during the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan.

The problem, Harrison says, is the budgets have been stretched by rising personnel costs, more expensive technology investments and other factors, compounded by the cumulative effects of more than a decade of combat in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. And throughout this period, the military has been required to keep up or even increase its pace of operations at home and abroad — and there is no letup in sight.

“We are stretched too thin,” Harrison said Friday. “We are trying to do too much with the size force that we have all around the world. Money doesn’t necessarily fix that.”

The U.S. has far fewer troops in Iraq than it did 10 years ago, and the roughly 15,000 in Afghanistan today compare with a peak of 100,000 in 2010-11, but the trend is leaning in the opposite direction under Trump, including stepped up counterterrorism operations in Somalia and Yemen. Also, the prospect of war against North Korea looms as Trump insists the North give up its nuclear weapons.