A debate over the military’s budget is emerging between defense hawks on Capitol Hill and fiscal hawks in the Trump administration. The fiscal hawks, chief among them Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney, want the next annual defense budget set at $603 billion, a 3 percent increase from the last Obama budget request. The defense hawks say that after years of budget caps and cuts known as sequestration, a 3 percent hike won’t accomplish President Trump’s directive to “rebuild” the military.
As a 16-page letter signed by Chairman Mac Thornberry of Texas and almost every other Republican member of the House Armed Services Committee puts it, the level of funding outlined by the White House “would unintentionally lock in a slow fix to readiness, consistent with the Obama Administration’s previous position, from which we would not be able to dig out.” These House members concluded in their letter that a 10 percent increase (to $640 billion) is necessary to support a strategy—including troop levels and readiness, ships, planes, munitions, facilities, nuclear forces, and more—that addresses the threats we face.
Arizona’s John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is in full agreement with his counterpart in the House. “I’m going to vote against anything that’s not at the $640 [billion] level,” he told The Weekly Standard on March 7. “Anything less than what we want is dead.” McCain said his comments reflected the “sentiment of the majority of the Armed Services Committee, both Republican and Democrat.”
What’s unknown—and has sparked a certain amount of concern among defense hawks in Congress—is what one very important voice, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, may have to say about the debate. “I don’t know. I don’t know yet,” McCain said when asked about Mattis’s position on the budget.
“People knew that Mulvaney wasn’t going to be supportive, but the hope was that Mattis was going to be in a position where he could basically roll Mulvaney, based on our national security needs. That’s not what we’ve seen,” one Republican member of Congress told me. “I’m concerned that we didn’t see any pushback from [Mattis] publicly at all when the $603 [billion] number was floated.”
Mattis’s private comments have been even more disturbing to some defense hawks than his public silence. Several sources familiar with Mattis’s discussions with members of Congress have described Mattis as overly optimistic about the adequacy of a $603 billion budget. In Mattis’s view, these congressional sources say, a $603 billion budget may not allow the military to rebuild right away but it can restore much of the readiness lost due to recent cuts. Asked for comment about Mattis’s position, a Pentagon spokesman told The Weekly Standard: “Developing the budget is an iterative process. There is still much work to be done in close coordination with [the Office of Management and Budget].”
The debate will ultimately be settled by Congress and the president, but for defense hawks to win it, “I think you need the help from General Mattis,” says Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, a Marine veteran who sits on the Armed Services Committee. “Generals are used to saying we can do more with less. That’s the old policy line that every general says because they deal with the budget they’re given from the commander in chief,” adds Hunter, an early Trump supporter: “When you’re secretary of defense, you have to fight for what the president says he wants, not with what the military says it can get away with or make-do with.” And what the president has said he wants—a rebuilt military—can’t be accomplished with a $603 billion budget, Hunter says. “The budget recommendations we’ve seen so far don’t line up with what the president has said.”
Hunter said that he didn’t know where Mattis stands on the budget, but he expressed concern that there are too many Obama holdovers in the Trump administration comfortable with a $603 billion budget. “Besides General Mattis, you don’t have any Trump-appointee secretaries yet . . . except for the Air Force. So who’s going to push for it? Not the people who wrote the budget in the first place for the Obama administration. Those are the folks who didn’t want it going up anyway,” says Hunter.
“Part of the Democrats’ strategy is to force Trump to be reliant on Obama appointees,” says Alabama congressman and Armed Services Committee member Mo Brooks. One Republican member of Congress specifically pointed to deputy defense secretary Robert Work, an Obama holdover, who “negotiated the $603 billion number with the Senate Democrats” and “is advising Mattis this is the best you can do, essentially negotiating against ourselves from the get-go.”
The $603 billion figure is not set in stone, of course, and discussions between the Trump administration and Congress have only just begun. On March 7, Senator Lindsey Graham talked about the matter over lunch at the White House with President Trump and national security adviser H. R. McMaster.
“The president’s mindset is: ‘I want a military that nobody can screw with,’ ” Graham told TWS. “When it comes to [defense budget] numbers, I think he’s open-minded to whatever number is needed to get our military in shape to deter war, and if we have to fight one, win it,” Graham said. The South Carolina senator, who’s had a somewhat antagonistic relationship with Trump over the past couple of years, said that “when it comes to military readiness and spending, Donald Trump has been a godsend to me in terms of attitude.” Whether or not that attitude results in a rebuilt military, no one can predict.
John McCormack is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
