Carter to boost Pentagon funding on aid, equipment to Europe

In Tallinn, Estonia, last June, Carter stood with defense chiefs from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and announced that the US would spread 250 tanks, armored vehicles and other military equipment across six of the former Soviet bloc nations.

“In our budget, our plans, our capabilities, and our actions, we must demonstrate to potential foes that if they start a war, we have the capability to win”.

Senior defense officials have said that $15 billion in cuts required under a two-year budget agreement with Congress last year would largely come from procurement accounts since personnel costs and operations costs were harder to cut.

The Pentagon budget calls for $7.5 billion to fight Islamic State, a 50 percent increase from past year. The Pentagon is in the process of cutting projected spending by almost $1 trillion over a decade but the congressional budget deal past year raised the department’s spending caps by $25 billion for 2016 and $15 billion for 2017.

He also pledged more weapons, aircraft and troops for Nato’s new rapid reaction force.

Concerned about Russian aggression against Ukraine and Chinese assertiveness over disputed islands in the South China Sea, the Pentagon plans to increase its investments in advanced weapons to counter the military developments in those countries, Carter said.

Carter attributed changes in the budget to changes in global order, including increased military activity in China and Russia, Iran’s influence in the Gulf, the threat of North Korea to the United States and its Pacific allies, and the fight against the Islamic State.

The budget request also will include a quadrupling of the funds to support NATO’s effort to counter Russian aggression in eastern Europe, raising the current amount of $789 million to $3.4 billion.

“Key to our approach is being able to deter our most advanced competitors”, Carter said during a speech to the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., a group of private sector and government leaders who meet regularly to hear from national policymakers. “For example, we’ve recently been hitting ISIL with so many GPS-guided smart bombs and laser-guided rockets that we’re starting to run low on the ones that we use against terrorists the most”, Carter said.

The US military is working to defeat ISIS, he asserted.

The initiative is aimed at giving the United States the most lethal undersea and anti-submarine force in the world, funding nine Virginia-class submarines built by General Dynamics Corp (GD.N) and Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc (HII.N), and increasing their capacity from 12 Tomahawk missiles to 40.