Dempsey Lays Groundwork for Larger 2016 Defense Budget | Defense News | defensenews.com: The top US military official on Wednesday made the case for growing the base defense budget significantly over the $535 billion spending cap imposed by Congress for fiscal 2015.
While the 2015 budget has not yet been passed by Congress, drafts of the 2016 request are being passed back and forth between the Pentagon and White House, and the final top line number “is still moving,” said Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey.
But the one thing the two sides are convinced of is that “we need additional top line [funds] for the emerging new requirements” faced by the US military, he said.
There has been some talk that the Pentagon has suggested budgets as high as $60 billion over the $535 billion spending cap.
When Pentagon leadership began drawing up the budget to fund 2016 earlier this year, Russia had not yet annexed Crimea and invaded Ukraine, the Pentagon was not deploying 3,000 troops back to Iraq and thousands more to West Africa to help fight the Ebola outbreak, and leadership had not yet identified capability gaps in the nation’s space and nuclear profiles, Dempsey told an audience at the Defense One summit in Washington.
