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Air Force leadership spent months telling anyone who would listen that their budget would result in a smaller service today in order to afford modernization for tomorrow, and its budget delivered on that promise. But in an attempt to cut as deeply as possible to fund key priorities, the service has left itself in a precarious position as it heads into Congress to defend its decisions.

This week's rollout of the Defense Department budget prompted as many questions as answers about the U.S. aircraft carrier fleet and the status of future big-ticket jobs at Newport News Shipbuilding.

In 2011, the Army doled out its first contracts to develop new armored vehicles that could carry a full nine-man infantry squad. Building the fleet of 1,800 new vehicles was expected to cost a whopping $29 billion.

Much of what was briefed in yesterday’s budget rollout was discussed by Secretary Hagel and Pentagon leaders in advance of the release. There were, however, a few surprises in the details briefed by the DoD Comptroller, Bob Hale. Slide 11 of his briefing, shown below, lists Army and Marine Corps end strength and the number of carriers projected in the force.[1] The footnote at the bottom of the slide is key to understanding what is actually funded in the budget request. This footnote and Mr. Hale’s discussion of it during the briefing indicate that the FY 2015 budget does not in fact fund the higher end-strength and carrier levels listed in the column labeled “Goal w/o Sequester FY 2019.”

Last week, top US defense officials told Congress that if the Pentagon were allowed to bust its budget caps, it would save one aircraft carrier and tens of thousands of troop billets slated for elimination. But DoD’s new spending request — which stays under the cap for 2015 but exceeds the 2016-19 caps by a total of $115 billion — contains no money for the carrier and extra troops, according to a senior DoD official.

The Pentagon's Fiscal 2015 budget request, set for unveiling this week, is the closest the Obama Administration has come yet to meeting mandated spending caps, but has some long-term problems that must be addressed,Todd Harrison, defense budget expert with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, told reporters on Monday. Each federal budget the White House has issued since 2011's Budget Control Act has steadily moved closer to the spending caps, said Harrison during a teleconference. While the Defense Department's Fiscal 2015 proposal meets the $496 billion cap for the year, projected defense spending for Fiscal 2016 to Fiscal 2019 exceeds the caps by a total of $115 billion, he said. But Congress has not stuck to the caps either, said Harrison. A big question looms on the future of overseas contingency operations funding, as DOD has taken to moving base budget funding into OCO accounts, since they are a non-capped funding stream and these transfers have offset many cuts from the BCA. The practice appears to have continued despite the lower number of troops in Afghanistan. "This is a dangerous situation," said Harrison, noting that these funds could disappear quickly when the United States leaves Afghanistan. (See also Harrison's Fiscal 2015 budget backgrounder.)