President Joe Biden’s $886.3 billion Fiscal Year 2024 (FY24) defense budget request includes $842 billion for the Pentagon, a $26 billion, or 3.2 percent, increase over this year’s military spending plan with the “growing multi-domain threat posed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC)” again named the nation’s most pressing “pacing challenge.”
Both Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks and Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III used the same phrase in describing the proposed military budget’s emphasis on China, each calling it “the most strategy aligned military budget” in the nation’s history.
“Nowhere is that alignment more pronounced than in the seriousness with which this budget treats strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China,” Hicks told reporters in Washington on March 13. “Our greatest measure of success—and the one we use around here most often—is to make sure the [Chinese] leadership wakes up every day, considers the risks of aggression and concludes, ‘Today is not the day.’”…
