Trump Proposes Bigger Budget for Pentagon, Nuclear Arsenal

Date: 13 February 2018 - 20:50

News ID: ۵۰۰۴۷

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump has proposed a military budget that is the largest since 2011 and focused on beefing up the country’s nuclear defenses and countering the growing strength of China and Russia.
The proposal, part of Trump’s budget request for the U.S. government, would provide the Pentagon $617 billion and an additional $69 billion to fund ongoing wars in fiscal year 2019. That is $74 billion more than in the budget for the previous fiscal year.
Critics, however, say that the proposed spending increase falls short of what Trump had promised during the 2016 presidential campaign, when he frequently depicted the U.S. military as underfunded.
The budget documents specifically highlighted "reversing the erosion of the U.S. military advantage in relation to China and Russia,” which was a focal point of the National Defense Strategy unveiled by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in January.
Funds for the maintenance of the U.S. nuclear arsenal also increased.
On top of the Pentagon’s $686 billion budget request was an additional $30 billion for non-defense agencies including the Department of Energy, which maintains the country’s nuclear weapons.
The budget request for the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-autonomous wing of the Department of Energy, was $15.09 billion, an increase of nearly $1.2 billion from last year’s proposal.
The Department of Energy said the money was needed to modernize and restore the country’s nuclear weapons complex. The Trump administration has called for an expansion of the U.S. low-yield nuclear weapons capability.
The budget request must be passed by Congress, which controls federal purse strings and rarely enacts presidential budgets.
Mackenzie Eaglen, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, said "this modest year-on-year increase will not allow the military to pursue anything resembling a rebuild along the lines touted by candidate Trump on the campaign trail to rapidly grow the Army, build a 350-ship Navy, and increase the combat Air Force.”
*****(file photo) The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis arrives to join the annual Key Resolve military exercise conducted by South Korea and the U.S., at a port in Busan, South Korea, March 13, 2016.