Publisher's Synopsis
In most years, the Department of Defense (DoD) provides a five-year plan, called the Future Years Defense Program (FYDP), associated with the budget that it submits to the Congress. Because decisions made in the near term can have consequences for the defense budget well beyond that period, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) regularly examines DoD's FYDP and projects its budgetary impact roughly a decade beyond the period covered by the FYDP. For this analysis, CBO used the FYDP that was provided to the Congress in April 2013; that FYDP spans fiscal years 2014 to 2018, and CBO's projections span the years 2014 to 2028. For fiscal year 2014, DoD requested appropriations totaling $607 billion. Of that amount, $527 billion was to fund the "base" programs that constitute the department's normal activities, such as the development and procurement of weapon systems and the day-to-day operations of the military and civilian workforce. The remaining $79 billion was requested to pay for what are termed overseas contingency operations (OCO)-the war in Afghanistan and other nonroutine military activities elsewhere. The FYDP describes DoD's plans for its normal activities and therefore generally corresponds to the base budget. DoD's 2014 plans are similar to its 2013 plans. CBO produced two projections of the base-budget costs of DoD's plans (expressed in terms of total obligational authority for each fiscal year) as reflected in the FYDP and other long-term planning documents released by DoD. The "CBO projection" uses CBO's estimates of the costs of military activities and the extent to which those costs will change over time; those estimates reflect DoD's experience in recent years. For comparison, the "extension of the FYDP" starts with DoD's estimates of the costs of its plans through 2018 and extends them beyond 2018 using DoD's estimates if available and CBO's projections of price and compensation trends for the overall economy if DoD's estimates are not available. Neither projection should be viewed as a prediction of future funding for DoD's activities; rather, the projections are estimates of the costs of executing the department's current plans without changes. Under either projection, the costs of DoD's plans would rise steadily over time. In addition, those costs would significantly exceed the limits on budget authority established by the automatic enforcement provisions of the Budget Control Act of 2011, as amended by the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012-hereafter referred to collectively as the Budget Control Act (BCA)-for all remaining years subject to those limits (2014 through 2021). To close that gap, which CBO estimates will average between about $60 billion and about $90 billion per year, DoD would have to make sharp cuts to the size of its forces, the development and purchase of weapons, the extent of its operations and training, or some combination of the three.
