The White House and Pentagon are near agreement on a draft five-year defense budget that flattens expenditures though 2017, with the lowest war spending since 2004, according to an Office of Management and Budget document/…/
“This is the first time the Obama Administration has proposed a defense budget for the coming year that is less than the previous year,” said Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst for the non-partisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington/.../
The White House and Pentagon also have agreed to $82.54 billion in war funding for 2013 and $50 billion “placeholder” amounts through the remainder of the plan.The $82 billion assumes 68,000 troops in Afghanistan through that fiscal year. There are 97,000 today. The request is the lowest for war spending since fiscal 2004, when the Pentagon requested about $69 billion, according to comptroller data.
“The $82.5 billion requested is consistent with the number of troops they are projecting,” Harrison said. “Over the past six years, the cost per troop in Afghanistan has averaged about $1.2 million per-troop per-year, and that’s precisely what this budget works out to on a per troop basis/…/”“This budget fits within the initial budget caps agreed to in the Budget Control Act,” Harrison said. “It does not fit under the caps imposed by sequestration, which would reduce the base budget by about $54 billion below the amounts currently projected for each year,” he said, referring to the potential for another $500 billion in automatic cuts.