Long-Term Implications of the 2016 Future Years Defense Program

"In most years, the Department of Defense (DoD) produces a five-year plan, called the Future Years Defense Program (FYDP), associated with the budget that it submits to the Congress. The FYDP describes DoD’s plan for its normal, peacetime activities (corresponding to what is often labeled its base budget). DoD’s current plans are described in its 2016 FYDP, which covers fiscal years 2016 through 2020.

Those plans call for relatively flat budgets that average $534 billion for 2016 through 2020. (Unless otherwise noted, all costs in this report are expressed in 2016 dollars to remove the effects of inflation.) If DoD’s plans are projected for an additional 10 years, CBO’s analysis indicates that defense budgets would be larger, averaging $565 billion per year from 2021 through 2030 under DoD’s cost assumptions. Moreover, CBO estimates that the cost of DoD’s plans would be 4 percent higher over the next 15 years under a set of policies and prices that more closely matched recent experience..."
Defense programs