DoD wants to grow total budget, cut personnel costs: The Pentagon is seeking an overall budget increase next year, but spending on military personnel will remain essentially flat, squeezed by cuts in the size of the force and recent efforts to scale back troops' pay and benefits.
The Defense Department's budget request for fiscal 2016, which starts Oct. 1, seeks a total budget of $585.3 billion, roughly 4.4 percent more than this year's total defense budget.
Meanwhile, the portion of the budget that accounts for military personnel will tick downward by a small fraction to $139.9 billion, or about $55 million less than the amount approved for this year, according to budget documents released Monday.
Those figures include both the base budget and funding for overseas operations.
