A new report from a Washington think tank highlights current and future challenges facing defense spending, while the GOP-dominated Congress is expected to continue a bitter budget battle with Democrats and the White House when lawmakers return from summer recess next month.
Unsurprisingly, the continued enforcement of the 2011 Budget Control Act is among the Defense Department's most vexing problems, according to an Aug. 5 report by Kate Blakeley, a defense budget analyst at the Center from Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Blakeley told Inside Defense that a $150 billion gap between the Pentagon's planned five-year budget and spending levels allowed under the BCA would prove "problematic." The issue, she said, is compounded by DOD's continued reliance on its BCA-exempt overseas contingency operations account to fund base budget needs, "making the overall deficit more like $185 billion to $225 billion over the remainder of the" future years defense plan, or FYDP...