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The battle lines over defense spending in the Trump Administration are already being drawn. Senator McCain has staked out a broad vision of restored readiness, targeted investments in advanced capabilities, and thoughtful growth in military capacity. In this budget brief, CSBA Research Fellow Katherine Blakeley lays out the details of Senator McCain’s proposed defense investments with accompanying interactive visualizations.
In its first year, when big changes are easiest, the White House chose domestic cuts over national security. Strengthening the U.S. military was one of the key themes of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. After saying that “our military is a disaster,” and “depleted,” he colorfully promised to make the U.S. armed forces “so big, so powerful, so strong, that nobody – absolutely nobody – is gonna mess with us.” Trump painted his plans in bold strokes: increasing the size of the Army to 540,000 soldiers, adding 20,000 Marines, bringing the Air Force to at least 1,200 combat aircraft, and increasing the Navy to a fleet of some 350 ships.
Katherine Blakeley, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said that the Pentagon’s best hope to authorize a new BRAC round is to tie it to the military strategy Defense Secretary James Mattis is currently preparing, so that BRAC is useful even under a significant military buildup. “If you frame it right, you might be able to get more support,” Blakeley said.
"These airfield upgrades are sensible and necessary investments for our reassurance and deterrence efforts in Europe," says Kate Blakeley, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The improvements "will have a real impact on the ability of U.S. and allied forces to operate at these bases, especially in contingency operations."
“$18.5 billion just doesn’t go that far, particularly if you are going to take real action to address some of the force structure and readiness issues that we’ve been struggling with for the past several years,” Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said. “You can burn though $18.5 billion, which I don’t think we’re necessarily going to get, very rapidly.”
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.
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."
