The Department of Defense will be hundreds of billions of dollars short of what’s needed to enact the nation’s official defense strategy in coming years, a new report on the nation’s defense budget released Thursday predicts.
To execute programs and plans laid out in budget and strategy documents, DOD will need $200 billion to $300 billion more than allowed by automatic spending limits known as sequestration, according to the report by Todd Harrison, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan Washington think tank.
And the analysis doesn’t take into account the demands of new and intensified conflicts in places such as Ukraine or Iraq, where the United States has been pulled back into airborne combat missions. Since June, the U.S. has spent some $600 million on limited airstrikes and an advisory mission aimed at halting the advance of Islamist insurgents.
And earlier this week in Estonia — a nation nervous that its neighbor Russia is intent on dragging it back into a revived Soviet sphere — President Barack Obama hammered home the point that the United States would stand firmly behind all its NATO allies.
The United States now must decide whether to provide more defense funding or trim military missions — and potentially tell some partners overseas they’re on their own, Harrison said.
