Asserting that the US needs to maintain its leadership in every domain and region of the world, Pentagon chief Ashton Carter today asked Congressional leaders to help it maintain the status by halting the decline in America's defence spending.
"This committee Congress will determine whether our troops can continue to do so whether they can continue to defend our nation's interests around the world with the readiness, capability, and excellence our nation has grown accustomed to, and sometimes taken for granted," Carter told lawmakers during a Congressional hearing.
"Halting and reversing the decline in defence spending imposed by the Budget Control Act, the President's budget would give us the resources we need to execute our nation's defence strategy," he said before the Senate Appropriations Committee-Defence.
Carter said "everything he has done since taking office has reaffirmed for him that in every region of the world, in every domain air, land, sea, space, and in cyberspace it is America's leadership, and America's men and women in uniform, who stand between disorder and order who stand up to malicious and destabilising actors, while standing with those who believe in a more secure, just, and prosperous future for all Americans."
In the annual budget for 2016, President Barack Obama has proposed USD 534 billion for DoD's base budget and USD 51 billion in Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), totalling USD 585 billion to sustain US' national security and defence strategies.
"The Defense Department needs your support for this budget, which is driven by strategy, not the other way around," he said.
Carter said the prospect of sequestration's serious damage to US national security and economy is tragically not a result of an economic emergency or recession.
"It is not because these budget cuts are a mathematical solution to the nation's overall fiscal challenge they are not. It is not because paths of curbing non discretionary spending and reforming our tax system have been explored and exhausted they have not," he said.
"It is not due to a breakthrough in military technology or a new strategic insight that somehow makes continued defense spending unnecessary there has been no such silver bullet. And it is not because the world has suddenly become more peaceful for it is abundantly clear that it has not," he added.
"Instead, sequestration is purely the collateral damage of political gridlock. And friends and potential enemies around the world are watching," Carter said.
He said in order to ensure that the US military remains the world's finest fighting force, "we need to banish the clouds of fiscal uncertainty that have obscured our plans and forced inefficient choices.
