Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered big cuts in the defense budget over the next five years and he wants proposals for these cuts on his desk by Monday.
This from therightscoop.com.
The Washington Post said these cuts would amount to “tens of billions of dollars in each of the next five years.”
Senior leaders at the Pentagon and throughout the U.S. military have been ordered to develop plans for cutting 8 percent from the defense budget in each of the next five years, according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post and officials familiar with the matter—a striking proposal certain to face internal resistance and strident bipartisan opposition in Congress.
Hegseth ordered the proposed cuts to be drawn up by Feb. 24, according to the memo, which includes a list of 17 categories the Trump administration wants exempted.
Among them:
– operations at the southern U.S. border,
– modernization of nuclear weapons and missile defense, and
– acquisition of one-way attack drones and other munitions.
The Pentagon budget for 2025 is approximately $850 billion, with broad consensus on Capitol Hill that extensive spending is necessary to deter threats posed by China and Russia, in particular. If adopted in full, the proposed cuts would include tens of billions of dollars in each of the next five years.
The memo calls for continued “support agency” funding for several major regional headquarters, including:
– Indo-Pacific Command,
– Northern Command, and
– Space Command.
Notably absent from that list is:
– European Command, which has had a leading role in executing U.S. strategy during the war in Ukraine;
– Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East; and
– Africa Command, which manages the several thousand troops the Pentagon has spread across that continent.
Hegseth wrote in the memo, dated Tuesday:
President Trump’s charge to DoD is clear: achieve Peace through Strength.
The time for preparation is over—we must act urgently to revive the warrior ethos, rebuild our military, and reestablish deterrence. Our budget will resource the fighting force we need, cease unnecessary defense spending, reject excessive bureaucracy, and drive actionable reform including progress on the audit.
John Ullyot, a spokesman for Hegseth, said:
[T]he Pentagon would soon have a response to questions about the secretary’s directive.
To see an administration that actually takes cost-cutting seriously, is amazing. And let us not think for a second SecDef Hegseth would do anything to hurt the military or the necessary actions it does around the world. He totally has the military’s back.
God speed.
