One official noted that spending on the Islamic State fight was expected to be drawn from the roughly $59 billion Overseas Contingency Operations account, or OCO, a separate budget that supplements the larger, $524 billion base budget for fiscal year 2017.
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Mr. Obama said increased security steps undertaken by the US and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to date “were all necessary, but they are not sufficient”.
The Pentagon’s 2017 budget request includes funds to send 3,000 to 5,000 us troops to Europe as part of a massive increase in its defense posture there, senior defense officials told Stars and Stripes on Monday.
The Pentagon also is investing more in cyber, he said, requesting $7 billion in 2017 and almost $35 billion over the next five years.
America will spend £1.3bn ($1.8bn) on new precision bombs and missiles because American warplanes waging air strikes against militant fighters in Iraq and Syria for more than 18 months have started to run low, he disclosed.
The 2016 budget for military activities to reassurance allies covered the costs of sending hundreds of US troops in and out of Europe for short deployments, military exercises and other training missions.
“That’ll fund a lot of things”.
Jens Stoltenberg, Nato Secretary General, welcomed the extra USA spending. “It will be a timely and significant contribution to NATO’S deterrence, and collective defence”.
The US military is working to defeat ISIS, he asserted.
And the budget does feature the development of new projects, with Carter highlighting the work of the Strategic Capabilities Office, a group he created in 2012 to “reimagine existing DoD, intelligence community, and commercial systems by giving them new roles and gamechanging capabilities to confound potential opponents”. “And that’s what our budget is created to do”.
The military is also developing robot boats and a hyper-velocity gun – known as the electromagnetic rail-gun – that can blast a projectile out at an astonishing 4,500 miles (7,250 kilometers) per hour.
“While we do not desire conflict of any kind with any of these nations – and let me be clear, though they pose some similar defense challenges they are very different nations and situations – we also can not blind ourselves to the actions they appear to choose to pursue”, Carter said.
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The Pentagon plans to develop the most lethal undersea and anti-submarine force in the world, according to Carter. The plane will now keep flying until 2022.
