The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee released a “white paper” on Monday calling for a $640 billion base budget for the Defense Department in fiscal 2018 in a bid to set the tone for the incoming Trump Pentagon’s first spending.
Titled “Restoring American Power,” Sen. John McCain’s plan would be $54 billion more than the base budget called for by President Obama for the next fiscal year, and details broad spending goals for more troops, ships, aircraft, vehicles and munitions. The $700 billion top line would include $60 billion in overseas contingency operations spending.
“We are now at a tipping point,” McCain writes. “Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has often swung from retrenchment to overextension with a dearth of strategy, depleting our margin of global influence. We now face, at once, a persistent war against terrorist enemies and a new era of great power competition. The wide margin for error that America once enjoyed is gone.
“President-elect Trump has pledged to ‘fully eliminate the defense sequester’ and ‘submit a new budget to rebuild our military.’ This cannot happen soon enough. The damage that has been done to our military over the past eight years will not be reversed in one year. Just stemming the bleeding caused by recent budget cuts will take most of the next five years, to say nothing of the sustained increases in funding required thereafter.”
McCain said the plan must prioritize undoing what he believes are the failed policies and underspending by the Obama administration, and lays out goals over the next five years. “In this way, the goal of the next five years is more digging out than building up—halting the accumulated damage done during the Obama administration through decreasing force size, depleted readiness, deferred modernization, and sustained high operational tempo.”
Over the five years, the plan if implemented represents a $430 billion increase over the Obama administration’s forecast for those years. McCain writes that the defense budget should grown by 4 percent each year to maintain the military build up, meaning his blueprint calls for a $662 billion base budget in fiscal 2019, $686.5 billion in fiscal 2020, $721 billion in fiscal 2021 and $740.5 billion in fiscal 2022.
McCain is set to release a plan with his counterpart in the House, Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, this week that lays out their vision for fiscal 2018 defense spending in Congress.
Specifically, the plan calls for:
— Purchasing 59 ships over the next five years. This is more than the administration’s current plan of 41, but well short of the new Navy goal of 355 ships, since McCain writes that it is “unrealistic” to deliver the 81 ships needed by 2022 to hit the higher number. McCain’s blueprint includes purchasing five fast attack submarines, five fleet oilers, three destroyers, two amphibious ships, two afloat forward staging bases, two undersea surveillance ships, two survey ships, two patrol ships, one aircraft carrier, and one new small surface combatant. He also called for more investments in unmanned technologies that can extend and expand the capabilities of the current fleet and an accelerated submarine procurement timeline, up to four per year by 2021 compared to just two per year now.
— Cutting planned total purchase of littoral combat ships to enable the Navy and defense industry to begin construction of a new small surface combatant, or frigate, seven years sooner. The LCS program has been plagued with problems and some in the Pentagon, including Defense Secretary Ash Carter, have advocated reducing how many the Navy purchases.
— Pursuing “a high/low mix” of nuclear-powered supercarriers and conventionally powered smaller carriers by the mid-2030s.
— Increasing production of Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornets and EA-18G Growlers to mitigate schedule delays of the Navy version of the Lockheed Martin F-35. The plan proposes procuring an additional 58 Super Hornets and 16 additional Growlers over the same time period.
— Boosting Marine Corps troop strength to 200,000 by 2022, up from today’s force of 182,000 to allow Marines more time at home, reducing stress on both active-duty troops and their families. The current deployment-to-dwell ratio is 1:2, but the Marine Corps recommends a 1:3 ratio.
— Upping purchases of the Marine version of the F-35 by 20 aircraft over five years.
— Increasing procurement of the Air Force’s F-35A over five years to buy 73 additional aircraft.
— Keeping the A-10 attack aircraft, while procuring 300 “low-cost, light-attack fighters” by 2020.
— Studying the optimum size of the Army, with the goal of increasing the size of the force, but being careful not to grow too fast. The Army would risk reducing its standards if it tried to grow by more than 8,000 soldiers per year.
— Increasing spending on cyber by $2 million over the president’s budget request
