Pentagon projects budget plateau after initial increase

The Missile Defense Agency is forecasting no significant overall budget growth for its research, development, test and evaluation programs over the next six years, following a requested increase of $1 billion for next year, according to an agency budget document released Monday.

The agency expects to spend between $7.7 billion in fiscal 2004 and $8.7 billion in 2009 on research, development and testing of its systems, according to the budget documents. It says it budgeted $6.7 billion research, development, test and evaluation in fiscal 2003.

A senior Pentagon official said Friday the military was planning to spend more on missile defense this year than last because of an increase in development and testing of systems.

"Why are we spending more? Well we've moved, as I've told a number of you, from the research side to the development side in a much bigger way. Once the ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty went away we could start doing more than just speculating about sea-based capabilities, for example," the official said.

With the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty last June, the Pentagon was able to incorporate Navy sensors into its high-profile, long-range intercept testing.

Also contained in the 2004 budget, according to Pentagon officials, is increased funding for purchasing a range of systems and upgrades to deploy an initial missile defense capability by the end of 2005. Pentagon officials estimate those purchases will add $1.5 billion to the missile defense budget over the next two years.

By the end of fiscal 2005, the agency plans to procure numerous systems for fielding an initial capability to defend the United States, including up to 20 ground-based missile interceptors, 20 sea-based interceptors deployed on three reconfigured ships, land- and sea-based radar and sensors, and 15 upgraded surveillance and tracking ships.

At Least $9 billion Requested

The agency's budget projections do not account for future weapons purchases by the services, however, nor for funding requested by the Army and the Joint Chiefs of Staff for missile defense programs, which total nearly $1.4 billion for fiscal 2004.

Counting the requested Missile Defense Agency budget, and requests for Army and Joint Chiefs of Staff programs, the Bush administration is asking for an estimated $9.1 billion for fiscal 2004, making it the Pentagon's largest budgeted weapons program.

Defense budget analyst Christopher Hellman, of the Center for Defense Information, said that Pentagon missile defense total should be closer to $10 billion, as it does not account for $713 million requested for the Air Force in 2004, which the Pentagon identifies as having a missile defense mission.

Missile defense critic John Isaacs, president of the Council for a Livable World, said he is skeptical the Pentagon's forecast budgets will sufficiently fund the administration's plans.

"They claim that these additional capabilities are not all that expensive, $1.5 billion over two years, so that's why the budget does not go shooting up," he said.

"If I were the conservatives and looked at this budget over five years or six years, and looked at this deployment in Alaska and California, I'd say, 'is that all there is?' From the left, you'd say, 'is this the camel's nose under the tent?'" he said.

Baker Spring, a Heritage Foundation missile defense proponent, says the $1.5 billion should be sufficient.

"This is an incremental cost, it's not coming from zero. [It is] coming from a baseline that was already $8 billion," he said.

"There has been a train now for over a year planning for a Pacific base and test bed. It's that increment that takes you from the test bed to that operational capability that you really need to account for here," he said.

Congress, in the past two years, has appropriated more than $1 billion each year for missile defense above the agency's request.

Questions About the Budget

The total Pentagon missile defense budget request only recently climbed to its currently stated $9.1 billion level. The Pentagon requested $3.5 billion in fiscal 1998, $4.7 billion in 2001, and $8.3 billion in 2002.

Those increases began during the Clinton administration. The Bush administration is now pursuing more aggressively a broader range of interceptor systems and sensors and a complex integrated command and control system for identifying, tracking and destroying ballistic missile threats in various stages of flight.

Rep. John Spratt (S.C.), the House Budget Committee ranking Democrat, recently argued that the administration's funding level is too high.

"The problem with this emphasis on missile defense is that it draws both funding and attention away from nonproliferation efforts, which have an enormous potential," he said at an Arms Control Association event last month.

"While the defense budget has grown substantially over the last three years, funding for nonproliferation essentially stands where it stood in President [Bill] Clinton's last budget," he said.

The Bush administration did request significant increases for nonproliferation budgets this year, an 8 percent increase for the Pentagon's Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, a 30 percent increase for the Energy Department's nonproliferation programs, and a 17 percent decrease for the State Department's smaller nonproliferation budget, resulting largely from cancelled nuclear aid for North Korea.