The Pentagon is asking lawmakers to sign off $842 billion budget for next year. (US Army/Sgt. 1st Class Marisol Walker).
WASHINGTON — Pentagon officials today unveiled details of how they want to spend $842 billion next year — a record-setting figure that still counts on lawmakers to provide supplemental funding to replenish dwindling US weapon stockpiles and other costs associated with the ongoing war inside Ukraine.
“The [fiscal 2024] budget request remains in line with our strategic approach and prioritizes China as the pacing challenge, while recognizing the key threat posed by Russia,” Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Christopher Grady said today during a budget preview event.
Last week the White House unveiled top level details about its $886.4 billion national security spending roadmap for FY24, where $842 billion would be bound for Department of Defense coffers — a 3.2 percent increase over the FY23 enacted level. Now department leaders face the tricky bit of marketing their plan to a divided Congress prepared to metaphorically hack it up.
“This budget is based on the same defense strategy that we put out only 11 months and a couple of days ago,” a senior defense official told reporters on March 10 ahead of the rollout.
“Everything we funded last year is in this budget as well, there are no big plot twists in this budget where we’re going off in some new directions of new initiatives that you never heard of from us before,” the official said.” We think that’s a feature, not a bug.”
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While the Pentagon’s budget request does include the “small amount” of $300 million in the base budget for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, the senior defense official said other funds for the effort are not included.
“If that is still an ongoing issue in FY24, we would expect to handle that by contingency or supplemental funding, which is the way that every emergent operation has been handled for about 50 consecutive years in this government; So, no difference here,” the senior defense official added.
“[The war] is far too fluid for us to be putting anything now projecting into FY 24 what the situation might be,” the official said, noting that the Biden administration is committed to supporting Ukraine.
Looking towards China, the request includes $9.1 billion for Pacific Deterrence Initiative which includes funds for distributed air basing, a new missile warning and tracking architecture, defense of Guam and Hawaii, and multinational training, and experiments.
Breaking It Down
The request includes $185.3 billion for the Army, $259.2 billion for the US Air Force, $255.8 billion for the Navy, and $141.7 billion for defense-wide initiatives. With the addition of $11.5 billion added for nuclear weapon programs at the Department of Energy and roughly $32.8 billion for other classified programs, the administration’s national security request tops out at $886.3 billion for next year. (DoD used the Office of Management and Budget’s 2.4 percent GDP inflation figure when mapping out this request).
As for big-ticket items on DoD’s “integrated deterrence” list, the department wants to spend $315 billion on the research and development, and procurement of new weapons, $37.7 billion to modernize its arsenal of nuclear weapons, $29.8 billion on missile deterrence and defense, $11 billion on hypersonic and long-range subsonic missiles, $33.3 billion on space-related activities and $13.3 billion on cyberspace, according to a briefing slide.
When it comes to the Pentagon’s “innovation and modernization” bucket, a slide said the department is seeking $145 billion for research, development, test and evaluation initiatives, a 4 percent increase over the FY23 enacted level. This pot includes $1.8 billion for work on artificial intelligence (AI), $1.4 billion for Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), $687 million for the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve, and $17.B for other science and technology work.
The senior defense official noted that while the JADC2 request is “smallish” compared to other pots of money in that arena, the department is committed to seeing it through.
“[JADC2] is absolutely integral to what we’re trying to do,” the senior defense official said. “It’s central to our conversations about how we’re going to improve our capability. It’s not a giant expensive hardware program.”
One area of focus that is a direct result of the conflict in Ukraine: a request for five multi-year munition buys. Department acquisition officials have traditionally reserved the use of those types of contracts for larger ship and aircraft programs, but they worked with lawmakers to expand this power to include ammunition and launcher lines in the FY23 authorization bill.
However, contracts above the $500 million threshold still require appropriators’ approval and the services plan to seek it this year for the following: the Naval Strike Missile; RIM-174 Standard Extended Range Active Missile (ERAM), or Standard Missile 6 (SM-6); the AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile; the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM); and the AGM-158B Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range (JASSM-ER).
If the Army and Lockheed Martin can come to an agreement, the senior defense official said an “addendum” may be added to the request to also include multi-year buys for Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC)-3 missiles and Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS).
As for now, though, the Pentagon wants to spend $30.5 billion on munitions next year, and more than $1 billion for the munition industrial base, according to budget slides.
“When it comes to munitions, make no mistake, we are buying to the limits of the industrial base, even as we are expanding those limits and we’re continuing to cut through red tape and accelerate timelines,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said today.
Potential Red Flags
Even before the White House announced its spending plan for next year, several top Republican lawmakers in the defense world decried the budget as woefully inadequate. That list included Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a critic of the Navy’s plans for amphibious warships. Wicker’s criticism is unlikely to subside when Navy leaders head to Capitol Hill to defend plans not to seek funding for any amphibs, according to DoD’s weapon book, despite Marine leaders having said they need 31 of the ships.
USAF leaders will also likely face questions about their plans to cancel an alternative engine effort for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, as well as ongoing efforts to retire planes still popular with members of Congress in order to use that funding to invest in future capabilities.
For the Army, leaders will likely be peppered about the service’s flat budget, especially at a time when Russia’s land invasion of Ukraine enters its second year and may US Army weapons (like the Patriot, GMLRS, M1 Abrams, M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, and Javelin) have been either integral to Ukraine’s success on the battlefield or a desired capability for troops there.
US support for the Ukraine military will also emerge as a hot topic this budget season, in part, because Republicans now control the House and its committees, and Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., has vowed to no longer support a “blank check” for the war there.
