Republicans have historically supported a large defense budget, and most Democrats showed earlier this year that they don’t support deep cuts either when the party’s progressive wing unsuccessfully pushed for a 10% cut to use the funds to tackle the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.
While Biden has proposed ending U.S. operations in Afghanistan, he also took a hard line against several U.S. rivals and adversaries during the final presidential debate on Oct. 22, saying Russia, China and Iran were interfering with the election this year.
And like Trump, Biden has called for beefing up domestic supply chains in light of vulnerabilities that were made apparent by the COVID-19 pandemic, including areas critical to the defense industry such as semiconductors and communications technologies. His stance makes a large spending cut less likely, according to Eric Lofgren, a research fellow at George Mason University’s Center for Government Contracting who has studied the DOD budgeting process.
“This goes against what some of the Democrats and his vice presidential candidate were talking about in terms of ending forever wars and drawing down defense,” Lofgren said.
The size of the fiscal 2021 defense budget is already locked in under a bipartisan budget agreement, and the next president’s 2022 budget request is due in February.
That was from a Law 360 article, New White House Unlikely To Drastically Alter Defense Budget. Many members of the HASC including Adam Smith seem to be in favor of the GBSD nuclear deterrent, keeping all three legs of the triad. If the Democrats can’t get a consensus around GBSD, it’s hard to imagine what major programs they would be able to tackle.
At any rate, the FY2022 budget will be in transit to the Hill by the time Biden takes office, so realistically the best he can do is crash on FY 2023. But he won’t have a National Security Strategy or National Defense Strategy in time for FY 2023, so FY 2024 is what he’s hoping to affect. That’s a long way off. How far will GBSD get down the road by that time? It already passed Preliminary Design Review, and will probably be through CDR by that time.
While the Democrats talk about change and harnessing emerging tech, it seems rather unlikely. The shift toward the 2018 National Defense Strategy and emerging tech only started occurring in 2020 because of increasing budgets. With flat or declining budgets, there’s no “head room” to squeeze in new programs. Which makes me not confident about this part:
Both Biden and congressional Democrats have also made broad statements about getting rid of legacy platforms — older weapons systems that often have high sustainment costs — and paying more attention to new and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and unmanned systems.
That would bring defense spending more in line with what the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has floated as the future of warfare, a “mosaic … of disaggregated systems that are smaller and not these larger, monolithic programs,” Lofgren said.
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