Defense Secretary Ash Carter said Tuesday that the Pentagon’s fiscal 2017 budget will prepare America to face conflicts with Russia and China. The department also plans to spend 50 percent more on the fight against the Islamic State.
Carter named Russia and China as the “most stressing competitors” for the U.S. and said aggression from the countries in Ukraine and the South China Sea has “elevated their importance in our defense planning and budgeting.”
The secretary presented a preview of the $582.7 billion defense budget in a speech at the Economic Club in Washington. Full details of the administration’s request are expected to be released next week.
Because of Russia’s increased acts of aggression, the Pentagon is quadrupling its request for the European Reassurance Initiative from $789 million in fiscal 2016 to $3.4 billion in fiscal 2017. This money will support NATO allies amid Russian aggression, including rotating more U.S. forces through Europe, conducting more training and exercises, stationing more gear in Europe and improving infrastructure in the region.
Carter said the budget will focus on building up capabilities to deter or respond to aggression from other world powers in all domains, including space, electronic warfare and cyber, which will see nearly $7 billion in investments in fiscal 2017.
“The U.S. military will fight very differently than we have in Iraq and Afghanistan, or in the rest of the world’s recent memory,” Carter said. “We will be prepared for a high-end enemy, that’s what we call full-spectrum. In our budget, our plans, our capabilities, and our actions, we must demonstrate to potential foes that if they start a war, we have the capability to win.”
Other threats facing the country are North Korea, Iran and, finally, terrorism and the Islamic State, though he said he doesn’t expect that mission to go away any time soon.
“In the longer perspective we must also take into account in our budget that as destructive power of greater and greater magnitude falls into the hands of smaller and smaller groups of people, countering terrorists will likely be a continuing part of the future responsibilities of defense,” he said.
The Pentagon is spending $7.5 billion in fiscal 2017 to accelerate the fight against the Islamic State, 50 percent more than the previous year, Carter said. Almost $2 billion of that will go to buying more than 45,000 GPS-guided smart bombs as an uptick in airstrikes depletes the stores of U.S. weapons.
The retirement of the A-10, which has been key in the fight against the Islamic State, has also been delayed until 2022.
For the Navy, the Pentagon will spend $8.1 billion on submarines in the coming years, including buying nine Virginia-class attack subs and equipping more of them with a payload module to increase the number of Tomahawk missiles each can carry. To cover this increase in cost, the Navy will buy fewer littoral combat ships.
Carter said the department is working to save money by reducing overhead to save nearly $8 billion over the next five years. He also said the Pentagon is looking at reforming the Goldwater-Nichols Act, which dictates how the top of the military is organized. Improving upon the Goldwater-Nichols Act has been a key priority for leaders in Congress this year as well.
The secretary said he’ll begin receiving recommendations on how to reform the organizational structure “in the coming weeks.”
