Budget signals troop surge expected to be short-lived

Pentagon leaders did not include the hefty costs of sending 21,500 additional combat troops to Iraq in the fiscal 2008 wartime budget request they unveiled Monday, reflecting their expectation that the "surge" to quell violence in the increasingly turbulent country might be over by the fall.

The budget decision appears to run counter to conclusions in a report released last week by the Congressional Budget Office, which indicated the additional Iraq deployments might last a year or more -- and require thousands of support troops to back up combat brigades.

Defense officials requested $5.6 billion to cover deployment of the additional brigades in its fiscal 2007 wartime supplemental request, which it sent to Capitol Hill along with the next year's budget and a $141.7 billion supplemental war funding request for fiscal 2008.

But that fiscal 2008 supplemental covers costs associated with only 140,000 troops in Iraq and 20,000 in Afghanistan, the number of troops deployed before President Bush announced his new strategy last month.

Pentagon Comptroller Tina Jonas left the door open to seeking more money for the war.

"I think we know that it [the amount of the request] will be wrong," she said. "Obviously ... conditions will change and we'll have to adjust at that point. But this was our best judgment at this time." Jonas said she relied on guidance from Defense Secretary Robert Gates that the surge in U.S. troops would be a short-lived mission.

"Right now what we envision is a fairly short plus-up" to increase the number of U.S. troops in Iraq, Vice Adm. Steve Stanley, joint staff director of force structure, resources and assessment, told reporters Monday. "So that's what the basis of the planning is, and we'll see if that's accurate or not."

On Monday, Pentagon leaders sent 38,000-page packets of budget justification materials to congressional leaders, who have long criticized the Defense Department for failing to provide sufficient documentation to explain spending requests, especially war-related ones.

Included in that package, at the urging of Congress, were materials addressing the war supplemental for all of fiscal 2008. Last year, the Defense Department requested only a $50 billion bridge fund to pay for operations in the first several months of fiscal 2007.

In total, the Pentagon requested $716.5 billion -- including the fiscal 2008 war supplemental, a $93.4 billion supplemental for fiscal 2007 and $481.4 billion for the base fiscal 2008 budget. Defense officials have also requested a $50 billion "allowance" for war costs in fiscal 2009.

Under the request, the Army and Marine Corps would receive significant boosts in their budgets, largely to pay for the addition of thousands of troops. The Army's base budget would grow from $109.7 billion in fiscal 2007 to $130.1 billion next year, while the much smaller Marine Corps would increase its accounts from $16.2 billion in fiscal 2007 to $20.5 billion next year.

But despite increased manpower costs, the Pentagon's high-tech modernization program accounts would receive $176.8 billion, an $8.8 billion boost over this year's level.

The Navy's shipbuilding budget would swell by $3.2 billion over fiscal 2007 figures, bringing the accounts to $14.4 billion next year to pay for the first CVN-21 aircraft carrier, a Virginia-class submarine and other ships. The Defense Department budget also requested $27 billion -- $4.1 billion over fiscal 2007 numbers -- for aircraft, including F-22 jets, F/A-18 aircraft and V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft.

The Army received a $300 million increase over last year's enacted budget for its Future Combat Systems program, the centerpiece of its technology transformation efforts. And Pentagon officials want to increase spending on space-based capabilities by $1.2 billion over last year, to $6 billion.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is likely to fight Congress again over renewed plans to cut an alternate engine program for the Joint Strike Fighter. Lawmakers last year nixed Pentagon plans to cancel the second engine, produced by General Electric Co. and the British firm Rolls Royce, amid concerns that a sole engine provider was risky.

On Monday, Defense officials said the potential cost savings in eliminating a backup engine for the $250 billion international program outweighed the risk of relying solely on the primary engine, made by the Pratt & Whitney unit of United Technologies Corp.