President Barack Obama’s 2016 budget for national security is a reflection of the administration’s desire to hold fast to its Asia-Pacific pivot strategy even as newer threats like the rise of the Islamic State and Russia’s aggression in Europe impose new spending demands on various U.S. agencies.
The Obama administration’s $4 trillion budget for 2016 includes $619 billion for a broad set of defense programs and another $54 billion for all the U.S. intelligence agencies to meet both long-term challenges and more immediate threats that have emerged in the last two years.
The State Department sought another $50.3 billion — an increase of 6 percent from last year — including $7 billion for ongoing operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, and $8.6 billion for international security assistance that pays for a range of programs including counter-narcotics, peacekeeping, and training foreign militaries.
Obama’s budget calls for raising taxes on multinational corporations and rich Americans while overhauling the country’s immigration system to boost the economy with newly legal workers. The spending proposal, which ignores caps set by law, will likely face a barrage of opposition in Congress, where there’s no consensus on how to pay for increasing costs without raising revenues.
Speaking at the Homeland Security Department’s headquarters Monday, Obama said his spending plan “recognizes that our economy flourishes when America is safe and secure.” He said it aims to support American troops, bolster U.S. borders from threats, and help confront global crises including the Islamic State and Russia’s violent overreach in Ukraine.
Underscoring the focus on Asia, Secretary of State John Kerry, in his department’s budget submission, called the pivot to the Asia-Pacific region “a top priority for every one of us in [Obama’s] administration.”
And at the Pentagon, Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work said the focus on Asia remains at the top of the military’s five main priorities for the upcoming year. At the top of the list, Work told reporters, are efforts to “continue to rebalance to the Asia-Pacific region. We continue to do that.”
The Obama administration said the Pentagon’s budget is driven by the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, a once-in-four-year strategy document that mostly focused American forces toward the Asia-Pacific region while aiding allies in developing defenses to deal with regional crises on their own. The strategy calls for spending heavily on long-range bombers, new fighter aircraft like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, and naval vessels, as well as cybersecurity efforts.
The Pentagon’s budget includes $534.3 billion for regular Defense Department operations — an 8 percent increase over what Congress approved for 2015 — and an additional $50.9 billion for Overseas Contingency Operations that pays for ongoing wars and conflicts. That fund was reduced from the $64.2 billion Congress approved for last year, largely because of the drawdown of forces from Afghanistan.
“If your budget is a truest indicator of where your strategy is headed, then what the budget is telling us is a pivot to [the] Asia-Pacific” remains the Obama administration’s focus while “the current conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and in Ukraine are more near-term challenges” that are funded on an annual basis, said Todd Harrison, a budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
The budget supplement includes $1.3 billion to train and equip Iraqi and Syrian forces to fight the Islamic State, while providing few new details on how the Obama administration plans to combat the group in the years ahead. Of that amount, $700 million is for Iraqi and Kurdish security forces, and another $600 million is to train and equip vetted moderate Syrian opposition fighters. In 2015, the Pentagon got $1.6 billion for these programs.