Center for American Progress

Donate

Center for American Progress

Blueprint for Defense Transformation
Article

Blueprint for Defense Transformation

The defense budget is a complicated document. Depending on which baselines, inflation adjustment estimates and supplemental items one includes, clever advocates can make the numbers say almost anything they wish them to say.

Foreign Policy

Media Contact

[email protected]

Government Affairs

[email protected]

This past March Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced that the spigot of increasingly large defense budgets had been turned off—as he proposed a FY2010 baseline budget of “only” $534 billion. The momentousness of that announcement, however, did not seem to match the number. While it’s true that the Joint Chiefs prepared a budget for the incoming Obama Administration calling for $584 billion in FY2010—$50 billion more than the Gates proposal and some $60 billion more than the Bush Administration had projected for that year—last year’s budget had been $518 billion, $16 billion less than the proposed FY2010 baseline.

Read more here.

The positions of American Progress, and our policy experts, are independent, and the findings and conclusions presented are those of American Progress alone. A full list of supporters is available here. American Progress would like to acknowledge the many generous supporters who make our work possible.

Authors

Lawrence J. Korb

Former Senior Fellow

Laura Conley