Obama Releases Top Line for Defense Budget

The Defense budget is built from the bottom up with several levels of review and shaping. The services prepare their budgets in the Spring with each Chief of Staff prioritizing spending and ultimately coming to a top line for the service. These are submitted to the Secretary of Defense and his staff in the Fall. There is then a series of Presidential Budget Decisions (PBD) and Program Decision Memorandums (PDM) that tell the services what the OSD priorities are. These get the total service budgets to reach the OSD top line. Then this goes to the White House for another review and ultimate decisions to match the total spending decided upon by those budget people. The Associated Press reports that President Obama has submitted a total defense budget of $534 billion for 2010. The details of how this money will be spent are still be worked out with rampant speculation that several large defense acquisition programs will be cut. These include the F-22, F-35, Navy ships, the VH-71 Presidential helicopter and possibly the Army’s Future Combat System (FCS) and missile defense. There is also a plan to spend about $200 billion on current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in FY09 and 10. The majority of any budget is for people, pay, benefits, their support and that for their dependents and retirees. About 20 percent of the budget is for development and purchase of large weapon systems. So any deep cuts will have to come from that part of the budget. In about a month the actual budget will be released with all the details that Congress and the wonks desire; and then there will be a big fight over what gets funded and cut.