Book Description

Introduction. The Fiscal Year 2018 (FY 2018) defense budget cycle has been unusual in several ways. The budget request was submitted unusually late in the process, coming near the end of May, which makes it the latest a budget has been submitted to Congress since the president was first required to submit budget requests in FY 1923. When the budget was released, DoD also announced that it does not contain a projection for future years (the future years defense program or FYDP) that is normally submitted with a budget. However, many of the budget materials submitted by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Services do contain FYDP projections, prompting the Defense Department Comptroller to warn that, “The secretary [Mattis] has not spent any time at all looking at anything beyond F.Y. ‘18 to date.”1The budget request also came during a year when the Department of Defense (DoD) and much of the rest of the government operated for more than seven months under a continuing resolution (CR). FY 2017 was the longest CR for defense in more than 40 years, which meant that DoD did not yet know the level of funding for FY 2017 when it developed and finalized its FY 2018 request. Further complicating matters, the request exceeds the Budget Control Act (BCA) budget cap for defense by 54 billion. The Obama administration submitted budgets in excess of the caps in three out of the five years that the BCA caps were in effect, but the difference between the request and the cap has not been this large since FY 2014. This budget request was also submitted while several strategy reviews were getting underway, including the Defense Strategy Review, the Nuclear Posture Review, and the Ballistic Missile Defense Review. Each of these reviews could lead to significant changes in future DoD plans and budgets.Given the somewhat unusual circumstances of the FY 2018 budget cycle, this year’s budget analy-sis takes a different approach. Instead of looking at the details of what the budget request funds or does not fund, it focuses on long-term trends in the defense budget and force structure and identifies key issues facing the Defense Department as it prepares for the FY 2019 budget cycle.