A thirteen-digit defense budget? What $1 trillion dollars could do for the military

Welcome back to Defense News Weekly. I'm Leo Shane, Capitol Hill Bureau Chief for Military Times, coming to you today from our studio in Washington, D.C

Today we want to take a step back from the news of the day for a deeper dive into one of the recent major defense headlines, the White House's plans for a $1 trillion defense budget

Can't wrap your head around that? Well, we brought in two people here to help explain that. Joining me to talk through what will it mean for the services are two experts from Defense News, Noah Robertson, our eyes at the Pentagon, and Steve Losey, our expert at all things Air Force

Welcome to both of you gentlemen today. Thanks for having us. Good to be here. So talk to me about what this $1 trillion budget means

This seems like a number that is so ridiculously large. It seems like somebody's making it up

But we're actually not talking about an increase that's ridiculous for the Defense Department here

It's already a budget somewhere around $850 billion. It's a 15% to 20% increase

So this is something that we were probably headed towards in the next five to 10 years

What does it mean to be accelerating that now, Noah? When you're talking to Pentagon planners and they're looking at one trillion figure, just, you know, what are we talking about differently

I think the difficult thing to figure out is exactly what one trillion dollar means

Is that the base budget going up for the Pentagon, meaning they will get one trillion from here on out

is at a one-time surge of money that they're going to get in the form of a supplemental

which is being negotiated in Congress and will be spread over a number of years going forward

I mean, even people in Congress don't know this answer quite yet, which is one of the things that's making it difficult for Pentagon planners to figure out what to do with the additional money

They don't really know how much money they can prepare for going forward. Now, what you said is true

It is a lot of money, but it is something that we could be predicted toward. And we'll just have to see what comes and in what intervals

So, Steve, when we're talking about the services specifically with the Air Force, what are they saying when they see this

if they were to get a 20% increase in their budget next year, where does that money go

Is it just become a slush fund here, or is there actually stuff that it can sort of change

how they're looking at their budget moving forward? A budget increase of that size would probably give the Air Force a lot more breathing room

in its modernization efforts. There is a big modernization bill that's coming due

The Air Force is now in the process of some form of upgrading almost every kind of aircraft You got the B Raider the new stealth bomber that coming in The Air Force is still buying F from Lockheed Martin

You've got the LGM-35A Sentinel, the intercontinental ballistic missile, the nuclear missile that's going to replace the Minuteman III

President Trump just announced the awarding of the contract for the F-47

the new next-generation air dominance fighter. And that doesn't even get into things like the E-7 Wedgetail replacing the AWACS

There is just a laundry list of planes that the Air Force needs to upgrade

And they have been really worried about how they're going to find the budget for all of these

Now, the Air Force's budget proposal in 2025 was $188 billion. If you bump that up by 20%, that could get you to $225 billion

dollars, that could relieve a lot of the financial pressure the Air Force is looking for

But we're not just talking about, oh, we're going to go out and we're going to buy 50 new

planes. We're going to have 50 new. I mean, there is actually, this is really just keeping up with

longer term modernization and innovation plans within the service there. It could be a bit of both. Like the Air Force has, in recent years, trimmed the number of F-35s

they wanted to purchase for a variety of reasons, but financial is part of it. The Air Force hasn't

really settled on how many B-21s they're going to buy. They've said at least 100, but that very

likely could increase. So the number of stealth bombers that are going to replace the B-2s and the

B-1s, which are going to be retired, that's still very much up in the air. And, you know, a kind of

financial boost like we're talking about could prompt the Air Force to kind of change their

calculus on the actual numbers of airframes. Yeah, and if you don't mind my cutting, I just

want to say that for everyone watching, luckily all the planes and other equipment that the

Pentagon is buying is running according to schedule, no delays whatsoever. The other thing

that needs to be mentioned is that the exact opposite is true for some of them. And that

especially for the Sentinel missile, this modernization money could actually come to

absorb the overruns that are happening right now with some of these programs. Yeah the Sentinel is there is a big financial concern about the Sentinel the cost of all those hundreds of launch centers the construction project It a massive infrastructure in the Midwest and that cost has created a lot of concern in the Defense Department

One of the things I found really interesting with this higher number is that

they don't seem to be earmarking a lot of it for the personnel side. We've already seen some

internal budget documents that have put the military pay raise at 3.8% next year, which is

about on par with what they expect. I know that recruiting and retention have been major issues

but they're not talking about massive increases in the number of airmen or soldiers or sailors

coming in. So this is not money that's going to be eaten up by personnel like it often we hear the

Pentagon planners complain about. So is it shocking that, I guess that's part of the pitch

here, is that, hey, we need to go beyond just the personnel side. We need to go beyond just this and

actually look at what we've got, look at the training, look at where we can go from here

I think some of the pay raises that you've seen in recent years have been in response to large

jumps in inflation that have happened around the country. So just to keep up with inflation

they've had to increase the Pentagon budget by a certain amount every year so that people are not

leaving the military so that they can get better paying jobs elsewhere. 3.8% coming up this year

would be above the raise of the level of inflation, though still not as much of a bump as people have been used to in recent years

And you're right that there has been a recruiting issue. We've seen that start to taper off somewhat

The new administration is taking credit for that in part. Some of it may be a tail over from the past administration's efforts

But I think that's a less pressing concern right now. Now, what about what about different missions here

I know there's been a lot of attention from this administration on the southern border issue

getting getting getting personnel down there to having missions. I mean, is some of this money going to be earmarked just for longer term operations like that

We're not exactly sure whether the money will be earmarked, though certainly, as you point out, the Pentagon is going to need to pay for the surge of troops, 7,000 or so additional active duty ones to the southern border

That's so far happening on a non-refundable basis, which means that they are not immediately getting money back from the Department of Homeland Security, which is another partner agency

The same could be said for the operation going on in Yemen which is more than a month straight of bombings that have been going on to attack the Houthis which is a rebel group there we designated as a terrorist organization in the United States And the administration says it will continue to do so

despite the cost of munitions, in part because they want to open up shipping lanes, which have

so far stayed closed. Steve, what about things like additional flight hours, training, stuff like

that? I mean, I know that's always a pressure on the Air Force. Does this money buy some more

flexibility in that? It could conceivably do that. You know, there's concerns about how many flight

hours pilots are getting has been a worry for a long time. Pilots, if they don't get enough flight

hours, they can't keep up their concurrency. So they need to practice these flights. And so, yeah

more funding could pay for more of that, could help pay for more spare parts

increase funding for maintenance, things like that, which would mean more existing aircraft

would be mission capable and available to fly. So more funding could help with that

I know military construction has been another issue that has been hammered in recent years

but I wonder if, and again, Noah, to your point, we still don't know exactly where this is going

But I wonder if money will even go there looking at what the rest of this administration is sort of looking at

They're looking at reducing the footprint. They're looking at reducing infrastructure. It seems like the kind of area where your planners would say, hey, we need to replace these hangars

We need to replace these old buildings. But I don't know that this administration is necessarily going to look at the money that way

I think it depends on replacing it where. I mean, you have military construction in the Pacific, which is a huge goal not only of the administration

but also the Senate Armed Services Committee under new chair Roger Wicker

They want to do everything they can to harden infrastructure there in case of a conflict with China

It's very vulnerable right now. That's true in Guam as well. And remember, all this stuff costs a lot more to build out there

It's harder to get labor if you're on Guam or Tinian or some of the other islands that exist out there and are part of American soil

Whether that's the case on the homeland, we'll see. But what do you think about the surge in effort that's come around Leo

I mean, you cover Congress in the day to day. Well, you know what? Let's take a quick break and then we'll come back and talk about whether or not Congress can pass this and whether, you know, a few hundred extra million dollars is going to fall off the money tree here

But we'll be right back