February 2, 2016
Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter revealed the 2017 fiscal year budget request. Essentially it is a continuation of former Secretary Chuck Hagel’s view that the path forward for the U.S. is an open-ended arms race to safeguard the nation’s interests, even if they perpetuate our addiction to fossil fuels, particularly oil. It is a path of confrontation with Russia and China and the eventual annihilation of the human race.
Left unsaid is how much the budget will add to the national debt; it also assumes that the American economy will be able to afford such expenditures given the wholesale destruction of the middle class and the 47 million poor people who, through no fault of their own, do not have the income to contribute to the Treasury as much as they once did.
These are Secretary Hagel’s thoughts on the strength of the Department of Defense.
Five Challenges
The department must and will address all five challenges and across all domains, Carter said.
“Not just the usual air, land and sea, but also particularly in the areas of cyber, space and electronic warfare, where our reliance on technology has given us great strengths but also led to vulnerabilities that adversaries are eager to exploit,” he added.
Highlighting new investments in the budget to deal with the accelerated military campaign against ISIL, Carter said the department is requesting $7.5 billion, 50 percent more than in 2016.
Of that, he said $1.8 billion will go to buy more than 45,000 GPS-guided smart bombs and laser-guided rockets. The budget request also defers the A-10 final retirement until 2022, replacing it with F-35 Joint Strike Fighters squadron by squadron.
Strategic Capabilities
To support the European Reassurance Initiative, the Pentagon is requesting $3.4 billion in 2017, quadrupling the fiscal 2016 amount, the secretary said, to fund more rotational U.S. forces in Europe, more training and exercising with allies, and more prepositioned fighting gear and supporting infrastructure.
Investments in new technologies include projects being developed by the DoD Strategic Capabilities Office, which Carter created in 2012 when he was deputy defense secretary, “to reimagine existing DoD, intelligence community and commercial systems by giving them new roles and game-changing capabilities,” he said.
To drive such innovation forward, the 2017 budget request for research and development accounts is $71.4 billion.
Carter said SCO efforts include projects involving advanced navigation, swarming autonomous vehicles for use in different ways and domains, self-driving networked boats, gun-based missile defense, and an arsenal plane that turns one of the department’s older planes into a flying launch pad for a range of conventional payloads.”