For many years the Soviets have steadily increased their real defense
spending, expanded their strategic forces, strengthened their forces in
Europe and Asia, and enhanced their capability for projecting military
force around the world directly or through the use of proxies. Afghanistan
dramatizes the vastly increased military power of the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union has built a war machine far beyond any reasonable
requirements for their own defense and security. In contrast, our own
defense spending declined in real terms every year from 1968 through 1976.
We have reversed this decline in our own effort. Every year since 1976
there has been a real increase in our defense spending, and our lead has
encouraged increases by our allies. With the support of the Congress, we
must and will make an even greater effort in the years ahead.
The Fiscal Year 1982 budget would increase funding authority for defense to
more than $196 billion. This amount, together with a supplemental request
for FY 1981 of about $6 billion, will more than meet my Administration's
pledge for a sustained growth of 3 percent in real expenditures, and
provides for 5 percent in program growth in FY 1982 and beyond.
The trends we mean to correct cannot be remedied overnight; we must be
willing to see this program through. To ensure that we do so I am setting a
growth rate for defense that we can sustain over the long haul.
The defense program I have proposed for the next five years will require
some sacrifice, but sacrifice we can well afford.
The defense program emphasizes four areas:
1. It ensures that our strategic nuclear forces will be equivalent to those
of the Soviet Union and that deterrence against nuclear war will be
maintained; 2. It upgrades our forces so that the military balance between
NATO and the Warsaw Pact will continue to deter the outbreak of war,
conventional or nuclear, in Europe; 3. It provides us the ability to come
quickly to the aid of friends and allies around the globe; 4. And it ensures
that our Navy will continue to be the most powerful on the seas.