US military chief sees expanding missions, big budgets

US military spending must be sustained at least at current levels in the face of a decades long, generational war against extremists, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Thursday. Admiral Michael Mullen said the US military's missions are likely to expand rather than contract and that it must prepare itself for broader challenges than Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I just don't see us meeting the needs that we have globally in the world we're living in with less resources than we have right now in our overall baseline budget," he told an audience of defence and national security experts.
"The needs are pretty striking to me, including the preventative, deterrent, dissuasion kinds of things that a global presence and engagement permits or tries to achieve," he said.
Mullen, who became chairman October 1, spoke amid signs the US Congress is balking at the growing cost of the war in Iraq. The administration has requested 481.7 billion dollars for the base US defence budget in fiscal 2008 and nearly 200 billion dollars more to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office this week projected the total cost of the wars ballooning to 2.4 trillion dollars by 2017, including the cost of servicing the debts.
Analysts say military spending is higher now than at any time since World War II if war spending is added to the military budget, which has gone up by 34 percent since September 11, 2001. But Mullen argued that at four percent of GNP the base US military budget remains below the levels of even the 1991 Gulf War.
"Maintaining a balanced force optimised for fulfilling increasing global responsibilities with a declining budget just doesn't make a lot of sense to me," he said. "I believe four percent (of GNP) is the floor, it may even be higher," he added.
In a speech and question-and-answer session, Mullen argued that the United States needs to ensure the US armed forces are capable of taking on other missions even as it tries to ease the strains on its ground forces. "I think we are in a long, generational decades kind of conflict against the radical, extremist jihadists," he said.
The army and marine corps, the services that have shouldered the burden of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, are unlikely to return to peacetime deployment rotations anytime soon, he said. "In this era of persistent engagement and conflict, I don't see our global responsibilities diminishing anytime soon," he said.