Trump’s military build- up plan lacks strategy but has big price tag, experts say
The military build- up plan Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump announced on Thursday would cost hundreds of billions of dollars — but with no apparent strategy, defence experts from across the political spectrum said yesterday.
“I haven’t seen any kind of strategy,” said William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Centre for International Policy. “He [ Trump] says nobody is going to challenge us because we will be so strong. But that’s not a strategy.
“It’s just a kind of wishfulfillment.”
US Senator Jeff Sessions, a top Trump backer who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the proposal was based on recommendations from groups such as the National Defence Panel and served as a statement of Trump’s commitment to build the military.
“I believe this lays out a framework for rebuilding the military, and it represents a commitment by Donald Trump to make this a priority,” Sessions said in an interview.
Trump’s proposal, unveiled in a speech on Thursday, did not spell out how he would accommodate the additional manpower and hardware as the US shutters military bases, or where and for what purposes the larger forces would be employed. There were no cost estimates and Trump proposed revenue- raising steps that budget experts called insufficient.
“He just called for higher defence spending without giving us a number and without telling us how he is going to pay for it,” said Lawrence Korb, a former Reagan Administration Pentagon official and senior fellow at the Centre for American Progress, a thinktank aligned with the Obama Administration.
Trump pledged to expand the army to 540,000 active- duty troops from its current 480,000, increase the Marine Corps from 23 to 36 battalions — or as many as 10,000 more marines — boost the navy from 276 to 350 ships and submarines, and raise air force tactical aircraft from 1100 to 1200.
Trump said he would bolster the development of missile defences and cyber capabilities.
He made no mention of US nuclear forces already in the midst of a modernisation effort that will cost an estimated $ 1 trillion ($ 1.35tr) over 30 years.
To pay for the build- up, Trump said he would ask Congress to lift a Pentagon budget cap and “fully offset” the increased costs by collecting unpaid taxes, cutting appropriations for federal programmes operating without congressional reauthorisation, cracking down on social wel- fare fraud and other fraud, and collecting additional taxes and fees from increased energy production.
Writing in the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, Tom Donnelly, a defence scholar at the American Enterprise Institute thinktank who opposes Trump’s election, said: “Trump undercut the power of his proposals by softpedalling the cost of such a build- up.”
Independent cost estimates for Trump’s plan range from US$ 150 billion in additional spending over 10 years, according to the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, to as much as US$ 900b billion over the same period, as assessed by Todd Harrison, a defence budget analyst at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies thinktank.
Harrison said that increase could be achieved only by raising the federal budget deficit, raising taxes, or cutting other spending, such as benefits programs for seniors and the poor. “None of those things are politically popular,” he said.
“The whole thing is unrealistic,” said Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon’s top financial official under former President George W Bush. Zakheim, who opposes a Trump presidency, estimates that Trump’s plan would boost defence spending by roughly US$ 300b over five years.
“It’s a soundbite,” he said.