President Joe Biden talks with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley.

WASHINGTON: The 2022 defense budget will see “probably the largest ever request” for research and development to counter China’s increasing military prowess, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told the House Appropriation defense subcommittee today.

Pumping money into new and emerging technologies has been a cornerstone of Biden administration messaging on the $715 billion budget. But the overall budget is expected to fail to keep up with inflation, a fact that has drawn sharp criticism from Republicans and quiet opposition from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

Testifying alongside Chairman of the Joint Chief, Gen. Mark Milley, Austin said the budget — which will be released tomorrow — will “see investments in missile defeat and defense. You’ll see a significant investment in our naval forces, long-range fires, and probably the largest-ever request for RDT&E for development of technologies.”

Austin and Milley declined share any details about specific parts of the budget, but the focus on emerging technologies will likely be a major theme this year and next as the Pentagon moves to retire old equipment and re-tool as the military pursues the new American way of war, All Domain Operations.

In 2021, the Trump administration requested $107 billion for RDT&E, which will be the baseline for any increases this year.

Milley added that President Biden’s first defense budget “biases the future, slightly,” over the present, but he said that he doesn’t see any one service taking precedence over another in the divvying up of money. 

It was a much less dire assessment than the one he gave in December, when he predicted a budgetary “bloodletting” to build more Navy ships and fund modernization for the Air and Space Forces. (That is probably because the Biden Administration largely inherited the Trump Administration’s budget plan for 2022, as is common with new administrations.)

“We are trying right now to put down payments on investments that are going to pay huge dividends 5, 10, 15 years from now,” Milley continued, “for a future force that’ll be able to compete successfully with any adversary out there, to include China. Long range precision fires are one of many of those capabilities and it’s important that all of the services have that capability.” 

The reference to long-range fires comes from a recent dustup in which the commander of Air Force’s Global Strike Command said the Army’s effort to build long-range strike weapons was “a stupid idea” that was wasting money on something the Air Force “has mastered.”

MIlley said that all of the services need to invest in long-range precision fires in the coming years, and they need to be networked into a joint system.

The Army in particular “is not gonna get shortchanged in my view,” Milley said, as the focus shifts to building ships for the Navy and developing new aircraft for the Air Force. “I’ve looked at this budget very closely…I think it’s very balanced amongst all the services and develops their capabilities. The ‘big six’ the Army is developing for their modernization program…are all being very well funded in this budget.”

The Biden administration’s budget priorities were most fully outlined in a Feb. 17 memo by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, which underscored the urgency the department has placed in a variety of major acquisition programs.

In the memo, Hicks directed the Office of the Director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) to review a handful of critical acquisition efforts, including shipbuilding, nuclear command, control, and communications, and long range fires.