White House Unveils 2013 Defense Budget Caps

2 Dec 2011 By RICK MAZE DefenseNews

The Obama administration is planning for a $523.42 billion base defense budget in 2013 with an additional $82.53 billion for contingency operations, a combined one-year reduction of about $47 billion in the base budget and an assumption of a $35 billion drop in operating costs in Iraq and Afghanistan from what was previously planned.

The budget caps agreed to by Pentagon officials and the White House's Office of Management and Budget are being used to write the detailed 2013 budget plan that will be submitted to Congress early next year for the fiscal year that begins next Oct. 1.

Over five years, the Obama plan calls for a $261 billion reduction from the budget guidelines of just one year ago. This allow for modest growth in 2014 through 2017 in the base defense budget, even though totals will be more than $50 billion less each year than previously planned.

The guidance also assumes that the cost of contingency operations, which was $160 billion a year in 2011, would fall to about $50 billion a year beginning in 2014.

No assumptions are included in the guidance about how the Defense Department might be affected by the automatic budget cuts set to take effect on Jan. 2, 2013, because Congress has failed to find another way of producing $1.2 trillion in savings. Congressional and industry sources said the Pentagon does not appear to be doing any detailed work on how sequestration - the technical name for the automatic cuts - might affect programs.

Under the formula in the Budget Control Act of 2011 for producing the $1.2 trillion in automatic, across-the-board savings, the base defense budget faces sequestration of about 10 percent, or an additional $52 billion. Contingency funds are not subject to sequestration, under last year's deficit reduction law. The budget law grants the president the authority to exempt military personnel funds from sequestration, but the Defense Department would have to make up the difference through deeper cuts in non-personnel programs.