Despite heated campaign rhetoric, President Barack Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney mostly share common ground on national security issues but they are sharply at odds over the defence budget. Romney has accused Obama of short-changing the country's armed forces and has vowed to boost funding for the world's most powerful military, promising more warships, more submarines and more troops in uniform.
"I'll roll back President Obama's deep and arbitrary cuts to our national defence that would devastate our military," Romney said in a major foreign policy speech this month. "I'll make the critical defence investments that we need to remain secure."
The former Massachusetts governor would reverse a decision by the Obama administration to scale back the size of the Army and Marine Corps by about 100,000 troops, and says he would build 15 ships a year instead of the nine planned by Obama. Romney, whose advisers include the former navy secretary under Ronald Reagan, John Lehman, and ex-CIA director Michael Hayden, who served in George W. Bush's administration, has promised to boost defence spending to four percent of GDP. His pledge would mean expanding the military's budget by a massive $2 trillion over 10 years, a 35 percent increase compared to Obama's plan, according to analysts.