War-funds request setting yearly record

The Defense Department has requested $99.7 billion more in emergency funding for Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terrorism that, if approved, would bring war spending in fiscal 2007 to a record $170 billion.

The request is in a 17-page memo approved Dec. 7 by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England that is under review at the White House. About half the new money — $48 billion — would go to the Army, which says its costs have risen sharply as fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan drags on and more equipment is destroyed or damaged.

The request, added to the $70 billion that Congress approved in September, is 45 percent higher than the $117 billion in supplemental funding approved last year. It reflects an earlier England memo telling the services they could include expenses they considered related to the global war on terror even if not strictly to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Congress since the Sept. 11 attacks has approved a total of $507 billion for the war on terror, sometimes adding to the military's requests. Still, any new request will be weighed by a Congress controlled by Democrats who, while vowing to support the troops, have pledged to change the conduct of the war.

Democrats will probably carefully scrutinize any request to ensure that England's memo wasn't an excuse to lard an emergency spending bill with non-essentials, said Loren Thompson, an analyst with the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., a defense analysis center.

"Democratic lawmakers have said that the era of big, hard- to- explain supplementals should be ending," Thompson said. "This supplemental will probably exacerbate that concern. The Pentagon will have to explain the relevance of every item. That will be a hard case to make."

Polls show Americans' support for the war and President Bush's handling of it at new lows. Bush says he's reviewing options and will announce "a new way forward" in a speech to the nation early next year.

The Pentagon's new request appears to reflect one recommendation from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, as the amount for training and equipping Iraqi and Afghan security forces would almost double to $9.7 billion.

Bush has said that improving the proficiency and numbers of Iraqi forces is crucial to reducing U.S. troop levels. The 10-member Iraq Study Group said it was a matter of urgency, a critical step toward reaching its goal of withdrawing most U.S. combat forces by the first quarter of 2008.