How Obama’s New Defense Budget Looks Like Reagan’s
The Defense Department released its proposed budget for fiscal 2016 on Monday, asking Congress for $585 billion as part of President Obama’s $4 trillion budget request. The Pentagon’s slice of the pie would amount to a $25 billion increase over this year.
Defense officials are casting that number in a different light, though. As shown in the chart above — included in budget documents released by the Pentagon — the new funding levels proposed by the administration are in line with spending levels in the 1980s, after President Reagan built up the military following steep cuts after the Vietnam War. The message: While the Defense Department doesn’t need to spend as much as it did during the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it still needs the cash to prepare for a variety of crises.
“We have little margin left for error or strategic surprise,” Adm. James A. Winnefeld Jr., the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters on Monday.