Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, just before departing on his first overseas trip to Japan and South Korea, issued urgent guidance to the Pentagon to speed up a review of this year’s budget request, with the goal of greatly increasing funding for what he called “urgent warfighting readiness shortfalls.”
The four-page memo signed Tuesday directs the services to look for ways “to increase force structure in critical areas where doing so would have an immediate readiness impact.”
Mattis also said some of the money for the build-up of troops and equipment will come from the budgets for other “lower priority programs,” and said the final budget will be a net increase over the fiscal 2017 topline requested by the Obama administration.
“The FY 2018 [Pentagon budget] request will focus on balancing the program, addressing pressing programmatic shortfalls, while continuing to rebuild readiness,” Mattis wrote. “Examples include, but are not limited to, buying more critical munitions, funding facilities sustainment at a higher rate, building programs for promising advanced capability demonstrations, investing in critical enablers, and growing force structure at the maximum responsible rate.”
Mattis said he has three goals — two immediate and one longer term — to improve warfighting readiness, address pressing shortfalls, and then eventually build a larger, more capable military.
“The ultimate objective is to build a larger, more capable, and more lethal joint force, driven by a new National Defense Strategy,” Mattis said. “Phases one and two are intermediate objectives, but we should be working towards the ultimate phase three goal throughout the process.”
