This Is the First Step Towards Saving the U.S. Military from Disaster

Tom Spoehr

Security,

Trump's plan is just the beginning. 

On Monday, President Donald Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, announced that the administration will seek a defense budget of $603 billion for 2018—“one of the largest increases in history.”

Trump said non-defense spending would be cut by an equal $54 billion, “the largest proposed reduction since the early years of the Reagan administration.”

The White House characterized the defense bump as a 10 percent increase. Both the percentage increase and the $54 billion figure refer back to the 2011 Budget Control Act caps for fiscal year 2018, which is $549 billion.

As is typical in Washington, nearly everyone can find something to be unhappy about in this proposal. As in most cases, the reality lies somewhere in the middle.

Reasons to View This Announcement Positively: 

As Heritage reported in our 2017 Index of U.S. Military Strength, in the last five years as a result of a diminishing budget and equipment overuse, the military has been sorely depleted. The Army is smaller than it has been since World War II, the Navy the smallest since World War I, and the Air Force the smallest since its existence.

And it’s not just smaller—it’s less ready. As the military service vice chiefs of staff testified in January, only three of the Army’s brigade combat teams are ready to fight today, one quarter of Navy aircraft are flyable, and the Air Force is suffering from crippling pilot and maintenance personnel shortages.

Major weapon systems are also aging and not being replaced. The average age of Air Force aircraft is 27 years old, and the Army does not have the ability to replace its main battle tank, which is already 37 years old.

U.S. spending on national defense has declined to 16 percent of the federal budget from 32 percent in the early 1980s, constantly being squeezed lower by larger and larger entitlement spending. Similarly, the percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) spent on national defense has declined to 3.2 percent from 6.8 percent in 1986.