Pararescuemen assigned to the 57th Rescue Squadron perform dynamic hoist training with an HH-60G Pave Hawk in Romania, March 4, 2022. (US Air Force/Senior Airman Noah Sudolcan)
WASHINGTON: US defense spending is likely to increase given Russia’s ongoing war with Ukraine, the Pentagon’s comptroller said today.
The boost to US defense budgets is unlikely to be as “dramatic” as Germany’s recent pledge to increase modernization funds for its military by €100 billion ($110 billion), Mike McCord said during remarks at the McAleese and Associates conference today. There will instead likely be a “similar vector impact” to US defense spending, he said.
A wild card for the months ahead is the trajectory of the war in Ukraine, as the Defense Department may need additional money on top of the current plans for fiscal 2022 or 2023 if Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin orders further troop deployments to support NATO allies in Eastern Europe, McCord said.
“The funding that we requested …. was for the deployments the secretary has ordered to date,” he said. “So if the secretary orders more deployments or extends deployments, our costs will start to go up above what we projected. Now they don’t go up a lot, and obviously we have some other tools to deal with that by reprogramming. [But] if they go up a lot, and then we will probably come back [and ask for more money].”
McCord’s comments today echo those of House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith, who said last week that the FY23 budget would be “bigger than we thought,” as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had complicated the US security posture and impressed a greater sense of urgency for funding defense priorities.
Breaking Defense reported last month that the Defense Department is expected to receive an FY23 topline budget around $770 billion to $780 billion — a major increase above the $728.5 billion floated by appropriators for the FY22 defense spending bill this morning. However, that topline figure came before Russia launched its invasion, which may have upended spending expectations.
Despite all that, McCord emphasized that the upcoming FY23 request should not be seen as a “wartime budget,” stressing that “We are not at war with Russia.”
While the Pentagon has presumptive dates in mind for both the release of the National Defense Strategy and the FY23 budget, those dates are subject to change, McCord said. Further, it remains to be seen whether the defense strategy will be released before the budget request, though McCord foot stomped that the new strategy did help define the direction of the FY23 budget.
McCord declined to preview what to expect from the upcoming spending request, but pointed to space as one area of emphasis.
“Space is probably emerging in our internal reviews as the most important foundational area for everything that we’re doing [and] everything that we need to be doing, whether it’s versus China, versus Russia or anybody else,” he said.
