The president has proposed his defense budget for 2022. The budget has not gone down, which may not have been what some people expected. The Department of Defense (DOD) budget is $715 billion. This is an increase in the budget of $10 billion from 2021, or about 1.6 percent. Inflation in 2020 is estimated to be 1.5 percent. The overall budget for “national defense” is $753 billion, with expenditures for the Department of Energy and other federal agencies included.
Don’t have details of the budget. It may be out there, but I have not chased them down yet. So, I don’t know what the Army’s share of the budget is. Budget for 2021 included supplemental spending bills and funding transfers and the expenses for combat operations were separately funded. For this proposed budget, these are included in this budget and are $18.4 billion. This is apparently a drop of 21 percent from last year.
There is a renewed focus on conventional war against near-parity opponents. We are now looking at a 296-ship fleet vice a 355-ship fleet envisioned by the previous administration. The 355-ship fleet was kind of a wasteful pipedream that was not easily achievable. It harkened back to the movement for a 600-ship fleet that was envisioned in the 1980s. This was briefly attained before it was cut back. They are also decommissioning two Littoral Combat Ships (LCS), which always struck me as a bizarre expenditure of money. Then there is the controversial F-35 program, which has been reduce from 60 new planes this year to 48. They are retiring 42 A-10s, leaving the Air Force with 239. Artillery is back in fashion with $6.6 billion to develop and field long-range fires. Overall, they are spending a lot on R&D, the “largest-ever” R&D spending according to the SecDef (I have not tested statement against inflation). There was $107 billion R&D requested in 2021. For 2022 it is higher (but I did not see an exact figure).
By the way, the budget for the State Department and international programs is proposed as 63.6 billion.
This is a proposed budget. It is a recommendation sent to congress and congress can choose to do whatever they wish with it. As it is a Democratic controlled House and a bare Democratic majority in the Senate, it may be passed close to as is, but probably will not be unscathed. Most likely, if it is significantly changed it will be to reduce it in general or to maintain or restore hardware (LCS and A-10s) that DOD is trying to reduce. I don’t expect the final figures to be much lower than what is proposed.
The total active and reserve component of the military is planned to be 2,145,900, which is a slight reduction (4,475 less) than last year. Chinese active personnel is 2,185,000 in 2021. Russia’s active personnel is 1,454,000.
In contrast the estimated defense budget for the Chinese armed forces for 2020 or 2021 is given as $193.3 (IISS-2020), $209.4 billion (Wikipedia-2021) or $252.0 (SIPRI-2020). This is between 1.3% to 1.7% of GDP. In contrast the U.S. defense budget is 3.4% to 3.7% of GDP. The Chinese budget in purchase parity (PPP) figures I gather would be some 1.6 times higher.
The defense budget for Russia is given as 61.7 billion in 2020. This is around 3.9% to 4.3% of GDP (as of 2019). The Russian budget in PPP figures is probably around 2.5 times higher.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/28/pentagon-asks-for-715-billion-in-2022-defense-budget.html
https://breakingdefense.com/2021/05/secdef-rd-spending-to-skyrocket-in-22-budget/
Older related blog posts:
The Challenge of Getting to a 350-Ship Fleet | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)
The Saga of the F-35: Too Big To Fail? | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)
Status Update On U.S. Long Range Fires Capabilities | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)
