Military spending boost not expected to cover war costs

WASHINGTON

President Bush unveiled a $606 billion military spending plan for 2009 on Monday, as critics and independent analysts suggested the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will push the real cost of defense far higher.

The budget proposal, Bush’s last before he leaves office in January, represents a 5.4 percent increase from the administration’s 2008 defense plan, excluding war costs. The U.S. already spends more on defense than the rest of the world’s nations combined and Defense Secretary Robert Gates has urged additional increases.

The budget would provide a 3.4 percent pay raise for troops and a 2.9 percent boost for the Defense Department’s civilian workers. And it would continue an expansion of the Army and Marine Corps begun last year. The services expect to add a total of 92,000 troops to their rolls by 2012.

The budget also calls for a series of increases in health insurance premiums paid by about 3 million military retirees and higher prescription drug charges for both retirees and active-duty troops.

Veterans service organizations, a powerful lobby on Capitol Hill, have vowed to fight those increases. The new budget is the fourth in a row to seek to shift more of the military’s health costs to retirees, who have not seen their insurance premiums increase in more than a decade.

Of particular importance to Hampton Roads, the new budget plan provides nearly $4 billion to continue work on the aircraft carrier Gerald Ford, the first in a new series of carriers to be constructed at Northrop Grumman’s Newport News shipyard.

Congress already has provided more than $4 billion for the carrier, plus more than $2.4 billion for its design. The ship will be the most expensive ever built and the Pentagon’s costliest weapon. It is to join the fleet in 2015.

The budget also provides $3.4 billion for Navy submarine construction, including another Virginia-class attack sub. The Newport News yard shares sub contracts with a yard in Connecticut.

The two yards are building subs at a rate of one per year. Connecticut and Virginia lawmakers have been pressing to double that, perhaps beginning in 2010. But Rear Adm. Stan Bozin, the Navy’s budget chief, said budget constraints and ship schedules would keep the service from accelerating the pace of construction until 2011.

In all, the budget would finance the construction of eight ships, including one high-speed transport that would be built for the Army. The Navy’s proposed seven ships is two less than the yearly average that service officials have said they need for the fleet’s long-term growth, but Bozin said Navy leaders believe they can reach their 313-ship target by the end of the next decade.

Today’s fleet has about 280 ships; the total is projected to grow to 283 this year and 286 in 2009.

Also of local interest, NASA Langley Research Center would get $92 million less than its current budget – dropping to $608 million from roughly $700 million. But Lesa Roe, director of the Hampton facility, said Monday she has a positive outlook.

While down, the proposed spending plan provides $15 million more than officials were projecting a year ago, Roe said. Also, the proposal doesn’t include funding for certain science and exploration work that Langley expects to get.

As a result, the center does not anticipate layoffs, she said, “but we certainly can’t sit back and relax. We’re out working with the other centers and with our partners in industry and other agencies. We’ve got to bring in the work.”

There was no money in the president’s budget for expanding Portsmouth’s Craney Island to accommodate a new 600-acre Virginia Port Authority cargo terminal, but none was anticipated. Congress authorized spending $356.1 million on the project in November, too late for it to be included in the budget, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Still, to help keep the project on schedule, the Port Authority will lobby Congress aggressively to set aside money for the terminal, said Jeff Keever, the authority’s deputy executive director. Construction is scheduled to start next year.

Pentagon comptroller Tina Jonas said that, despite its heft, the defense budget proposal is incomplete. The plan includes only $70 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a figure Jonas acknowledged is a “down payment” on the real cost of those conflicts.

Jonas said reliable estimates of the wars’ cost should be available in the spring, when Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, reports to Congress and the president on the progress of the war effort there.

The conflict has consumed $691 billion since 2001 and current expenses average just more than $10 billion per month, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

In a news release, Virginia Sen. Jim Webb criticized Bush’s proposal for hiding the true cost of the war and for not allocating more money to domestic programs to boost the economy.

“Not since the nexus of World War II and the Great Depression has the country been faced with such serious hurdles from both an economic and foreign policy perspective,” he said.

While releasing the ’09 budget, Gates pressed Congress to act quickly on the administration’s request for an additional $102 billion to underwrite the war effort in 2008.

“Delay degrades our ability to operate and sustain the force at home and in theater, and makes it difficult to manage this department in a way that is fiscally sound,” Gates said.

Long term, Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also want lawmakers to boost the noncombat portion of the military budget by more than $70 billion, enough to make it roughly equal to 4 percent of the U.S. gross national product.

Staff writers Greg Richards and Jon Glass contributed to this report.

Dale Eisman, (703) 913-9872, dale.eisman@pilotonline.com