U.S. Military Forces in FY 2020: The Strategic and Budget Context by Mark F. Cancian – Center for Strategic and International Studies Report
Part of U.S. Military Forces in FY 2020: The Struggle to Align Forces with Strategy
CSIS Senior Adviser Mark Cancian annually produces a series of papers on U.S. military forces, including composition, new initiatives, long-term trends, and challenges.
This first white paper in the series analyzes the strategy and budget context for building forces in FY 2020, criticisms of the strategy, budget and resulting force plans, and risks for sustaining force levels in the future.
Key Takeaways
- The administration’s FY 2020 budget proposal continues defense spending increases to align U.S. military forces with a national defense strategy (NDS) focused on great power competition. This strategy prioritizes capability over capacity.
- Thus, the FY 2020 budget prioritizes modernization to compete with China and Russia and maintains the higher readiness levels achieved in the FY 2017-FY 2019 budgets. It expands force structure only a little. Even defense buildups have limits and require trade-offs.
- However, day-to-day operations for ongoing conflicts, crisis response, and allied engagement continue to put high demands on forces.
- These unrelenting operational demands require force structure and drive the services to a high-low mix: high for great power conflict, low (or less high) for day-to-day deployments and regional conflicts.
- Although widely supported, the NDS has been criticized by some for being underfunded and by others for being too aggressive, while the proposed FY 2020 budget has been criticized for not making sufficient changes to align with the NDS.
- The future presents two major risks for sustaining force plans: (1) a lack of real growth in future budgets; and (2) softening public support.
- Additional white papers published over the next month will take an in-depth look at each of the military services, DOD civilians, contractors, and non-DOD national security programs.