In June 2017, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified that the defense budget would need to grow, and keep growing, just to maintain our current military capabilities. To meet even that modest goal, they said, the armed forces would need to get annual spending increases above inflation of three percent at least until 2023. As for building the force to levels that the Pentagon deems necessary to assure national security, the Secretary estimated it would take annuals increase of five percent over inflation.

That will be even more challenging than it sounds. The Defense Department currently projects inflation for defense expenditures will run around two percent a year. So effectively, the Pentagon leadership was talking about annual increases of between five and seven percent. The administration’s current plan for the defense budget through 2023 does not reach the described minimum of five percent sustained growth. The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018, would provide substantial increases in both 2018 and 2019, then settle for roughly inflationary growth levels in the years following.

If Congress chooses to follow the Defense Department’s planned budget, our Armed Forces will be losing purchasing power in the coming years. In 2020, the defense budget would be $41 billion dollars short of what Secretary Mattis deemed necessary to build our Armed Forces. It would match what Dunford described as the “the floor necessary to preserve today's relative competitive advantage.”

But in the years thereafter, the gap between the Pentagon’s plans and the stated need little over a year ago would rapidly expand. At the end of the projected period, 2023, the gap between a trajectory of sustained annual seven percent growth and the current planned budget would be $168 billion. When the Pentagon submits its 2020 budget request this coming February, lawmakers should ask the big question: What changed? In the summer of 2017, the Pentagon needed continuous five percent growth. In the spring of 2019, it’s willing to settle for simple inflationary growth until 2023. What’s has driven such a radical reassessment?

Further, the Pentagon has suggested it may not request an increase in the 2020 budget. Instead, they may opt to find savings and efficiencies to fund new initiatives and priorities. That’s fine, if it can be done. But that’s a mighty big “if.” The debate over the appropriate defense budget topline is on the scale of tens of billions of dollars. Current savings efforts have reached levels in only the hundreds of millions. According to a recent letter by Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, the department will save $300 million this year through reforms in Information Technology and logistics.

Meanwhile, the debates in Congress about increases in the defense budget were in the $80 billion range. This disparity in scale illustrates that the discussion on the topline of the budget and on savings and efficiencies take place in very disparate planes, both equally important. It is imperative to pursue reforms and improvements to how the Defense Department conducts business. But these initiatives are wholly inadequate to meets the Pentagon’s budgetary needs.

As Congress begins to shift its attention from the 2019 defense budget to the 2020 budget request, it will be important to note whether the Pentagon follows its assessment from the summer of 2017 or settles for the inflationary growth described in the current budget request. The future of our military rebuild depends on it.