Army Program Could Boost Defense Spending

The Wall Street Journal 02/07/05
author: Andy Pasztor
(Copyright (c) 2005, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

The White House will unveil today a 4.8% increase in the defense spending for 2006 that keeps the Army's budget flat, despite ground forces bearing the brunt of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the Bush administration already is preparing tens of billions of dollars in additional spending requests to cover not only wartime costs, but also to kick-start the Army's modernization.

The $419.3 billion Defense Department budget includes an 8.2% boost for the Air Force and 5.4% more for the Navy over levels in the current fiscal year ending Sept. 30, according to government documents and lawmakers. But it doesn't show the full picture of how the fighting in Iraq has helped persuade the Pentagon to request significantly larger increases to reshape the Army -- a process that otherwise threatened to bog down because of competing budget demands.

In an effort to show its determination to control spending, the administration is holding overall weapons procurement steady at $78 billion next year. However, despite much-publicized proposals for cutting outlays for some high-profile aircraft and ship programs over six years, total weapons purchases nonetheless are slated to increase sharply during that period, the documents show.

Amid such budget maneuvers, it is unclear how much the Pentagon, the largest federal department, will help President Bush's bid to rein in the government deficit. Moreover, the White House's reliance on unusually large supplemental spending bills for the military this year and in 2006 masks the true growth of Pentagon spending.

For 2006, the White House is budgeting $100 billion for the Army, down slightly from the $100.3 billion approved for this year. Actual spending for 2005 will be significantly higher, because the Army received most of a $25 billion supplemental budget approved by Congress and is bound to get the lion's share of a further $80 billion to be requested as early as this week. Some $75 billion of those funds will go to the Pentagon.

Furthermore, the Pentagon is adding at least $35 billion to previous estimates of Army spending through 2011 to expand and restructure ground forces into smaller units better suited for fighting guerrilla insurgencies and other potential challenges in the war on terrorism. These funds will be used for buying and upgrading equipment such as troop carriers, advanced communications networks and unmanned reconnaissance vehicles.

Funding for this Army overhaul will start to take off in supplemental budgets for this year and 2006. Typically, these additional budgets are used to pay for unanticipated, short-term military operations. Yet reflecting the lessons learned in Iraq and the extreme wear and tear on equipment, the Pentagon has seized on supplemental budgets as a way of financing the modernization of forces. Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan cost the Army some $5 billion a month. The 30,000 troops that the Pentagon plans to add to standing forces also will be funded through the supplemental requests.