מזכיר ההגנה האמריקאי אש קרטר מבהיר את עיקרי תקציב ההגנה לשנת 2017. להלן מספר קטעים וקישור לנאום כולו

PENTAGON: After 25 years of war in the Middle East, the Pentagon’s 2017 budget is the first driven by Russia and China.

“The program has been shifted to a more acute focus on the two high-end competitors, Russia and China,” a senior defense official told Sydney in an interview ahead of Secretary Ash Carter’s budget speech this morning.

In his speech before the Economic Club of Washington, Carter put the case for a revamped budget simply. “Two of these challenges reflect a return to great power competition. The first is in Europe, where we’re taking a strong and balanced approach to deter Russian aggression – we haven’t had to worry about this for 25 years, and while I wish it were otherwise, now we do,” he said.

“The second is in the Asia-Pacific, where China is rising, and where we’re continuing our rebalance to maintain the stability in the region that we’ve underwritten for the past 70 years, and that’s allowed so many nations to rise, prosper, and win.”

“We knew we weren’t going to get any [more] money, ” the official continued: Last fall’s hard-won budget deal allocated $582.7 billion to the Defense Department, $524 billion in the base budget plus $58.8 billion in overseas contingency operations (OCO) funds.

Here’s a summary of the top weapons modernization efforts Carter outlines in his speech:

• Cyber will get “nearly $7 billion dollars in 2017 and almost $35 billion dollars over the next five years.”

• Undersea capabilities get $8.1 billion dollars in 2017 and more than $40 billion over the next five years for nine Virginia-class attack submarines over the next five years. More of them will get “the Virginia Payload Module, which triples each submarine platform’s strike capacity from 12 Tomahawk missiles to 40.”

• Counterterrorism gets $7.5 billion dollars in 2017 – 50 percent more than 2016.

• Precision munitions. Carter noted “we’re starting to run low on the ones we use against terrorists the most. So we’re investing $1.8 billion dollars in 2017 to buy over 45,000 more of them.

• Research and development spending increases for the second year in a row, up to $71.4 billion dollars. Carter highlighted work of the little-known Strategic Capabilities Office, which he created when he was Deputy Defense Secretary. We’ll have a separate story about this.

http://breakingdefense.com/2016/02/...&_hsmi=25867913