Ploughshares Fund Senior Analyst Benjamin Loehrke has published a piece on missile defense on our website titled “Missile Defense Spending is Going to Stagnate.”
Here are some of the main points.
Missile defense spending is slated to stay at around $9.5 billion per year for the next five years, with the amount spent on procurement increasing from 20% in FY2013 to 30% in FY2017. The shift from research and development to actual acquisition and deployment of the weapons systems, such as the Navy’s Aegis system and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, explains this budgetary shift.
This funding schedule means that the missile defense budget will shrink by 0.6% per year during this period while the total defense budget is expected to grow by 2% per year, shielding it from inflation.
Ben postulates that the flat lining of the missile defense budget could be attributed to either bad management or the rough fiscal environment facing the country right now (or perhaps some combination thereof), with less important programs getting cut to preserve funding for more important programs.
Read Loehrke’s full piece here.
