Pentagon seeks significant spending increase in missile defense

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Saturday, January 31, 2004

Pentagon seeks significant spending increase in missile defense

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The Pentagon is seeking a 13-percent increase in spending for missile defense next year as part of its military budget request that sets an increase of 7 percent from 2004, said Pentagon budget documents released on Friday.

US President George W. Bush will ask the Congress for 10.2 billion US dollars for missile defense in 2005, up from 9 billion dollars approved for fiscal 2004, according to the documents that Pentagon officials said were inadvertently posted on the Internet. They were later withdrawn.

The boost in missile defense spending is part of a Pentagon budget request of 401.7 billion dollars for 2005. The budget will be included in a proposed 2.3-trillion-dollar federal budget that Bush will send to lawmakers on Monday.

The Bush administration plans to deploy a preliminary missile defense system of six rocket intercepts in Alaska and four in California by the end of September, claiming the United States needs such a system to prevent long-range missile attacks by the so-called rogue states.

But critics said the timetable is devised to field a missile defense system only less than two months before the 2004 presidential election so Bush can point to it as a fulfilled campaign pledge. They said a rush could lead to unforeseen cost increases and technical failures.

The overall Pentagon budget request will be a 7-percent increase over the 375 billion dollars for 2004. The Pentagon said the priorities of the budget request will be the improvement of military personnel's life quality, investments in better intelligence systems and measures to upgrade combat readiness of the military.

Officials said the Pentagon budget would not include the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Currently, the United States spends about 1 billion dollars in Iraq and about 250 million dollars in Afghanistan each week.

The budget will call for 3.2 billion dollars for the Army's "Future Combat System," a mobile combat network, up from 1.7 billion dollars in the current year. It will also call for an increase on unmanned spy planes.

Overall, the Pentagon plans to spend less on weapons procurement, seeking 74.9 billion dollars for 2005 compared with 81.1 billion dollars spent this year. Spending in weapons research and development, however, will be increased to nearly 69 billion dollars from 64.7 billion dollars, according to the documents.

Source: Xinhua

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