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Trump’s Military Budget Proposal Gives Defense Hawks the Political Upper Hand
An unpopular budget plan from a politically weakened administration will give congressional advocates of higher military spending an opening to lead the debate, says Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. In this environment, she believes military hawks are in a strong position to gain an early edge in the messaging battle.
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White House OMB Signals FY-18 Defense Budget Is a Placeholder
Kate Blakeley, a defense budget analyst for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the OMB document shows an annual growth rate of 1.84 percent in defense spending over five years. "I don't think they are hiding a defense buildup in there anywhere," she said…Blakeley also questioned why OMB would assume the 2011 Budget Control Act would be kept in place, asserting it was evidence of a fiscally conservative view. "Then why keep the defense caps? The budget could have called for the defense half of the caps to be repealed instead of keeping the caps and paying for them with cuts to non-defense discretionary spending," she said. "This is not a defense buildup budget -- this is a budget written by deficit hawks."
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Trump’s ‘Historic’ Military Buildup Vision Has a Money Problem
Trump's $603 billion baseline national defense budget is about $18.5 billion — or about 3 percent — more than the amount projected by the Obama administration, said Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
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Amid Raqqa, Mosul fights, US Prepares for IS Endgame Effort
"ISIS will go down fighting, of course, and do enormous amounts of harm in its death throes," Hal Brands and Peter Feaver, two U.S. defense analysts, wrote in a recent assessment of how the extremist group will be defeated.
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New Defense Budget Poised to Meet Lower Expectations
Comparing Trump’s budget with the early years of the Reagan administration buildup, and others, Katherine Blakeley, a defense budget expert with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said: “This is not a historic increase.” “The political characterization is that we are at the early part, and we should expect an upward drive,” Blakeley said. “We won’t see a lot of that in [the president’s 2018 budget], but they are clearly laying the groundwork for that. “In this budget, you see some trial balloons, like: Can we have an accelerated path to Navy shipbuilding?"
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The U.S.‘s Delicate Balance Between Arms Deals and Diplomacy
President Trump is headed to Saudi Arabia, the first stop on his first foreign trip as president. The Saudis buy a lot of weapons from the U.S., and more arms deals could be announced this weekend. The U.S. keeps careful tabs on who buys American-made weapons and what they buy. There is sometimes a delicate balance between arms deals and diplomacy.