Kate Blakeley, a defense budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the statement confirms what many people already know behind-the-scenes.
"This is the first time that DOD has publicly acknowledged what it has privately known for several years: that DOD relies on tens of billions of OCO funding for its ongoing, enduring presence and readiness needs, and that the force structure planned for in the FYDP is reliant on OCO money to execute," she wrote in an email to Inside Defense.
"This revelation is startling, because it contradicts DOD and the administration's long-held public position that all of the OCO requests since the enactment of the Budget Control Act, except for this year's $5.2 billion in 'OCO-to-base' money, were exclusively to support war funding needs," she continued. "It also reveals that the gap between DOD's base budget plans and the BCA caps over the [future years defense plan] is even greater than the Pentagon has acknowledged, ranging from $50-60 billion each year."