Trump's military plans require deft hands.

• Author: McKinley, Craig R.
• Position: President's Perspective

Historians will record the 2016 presidential campaign as memorable in many ways, even though in some ways its actual conduct made most Americans happy to see it conclude. But, conclude it did and on Jan. 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump of New York will be sworn in as the next president of the United States.

He will face many challenges. But certainly one that will need immediate attention involves the budget situation. Trump will find that the budget regime established by the Budget Control Act (BCA) of 2011, which includes caps and the potential for sequestration, is still in place. Moreover, the issue of raising the debt ceiling, which largely precipitated the BCA, will return to the stage after having been pushed beyond the Obama administration. It will be interesting to see if the Tea Party wing of the Republican party will resist raising the debt limit.

Why is this important to the defense industry? Simply put, eliminating or significantly raising the BCA caps, which only apply to discretionary spending in the federal budget, will have to be enacted before any major programs, either defense or domestic, can be pursued. In addition, increased spending combined with a major tax cut will certainly explode the current deficit levels, which have been slowly declining over the past few years. Such an outcome will be hard for the "fiscal hawks" to accept, even if they would prefer to be "defense hawks" given the strategic situation.

As a candidate, Trump identified several very specific defense steps he would take as president. He advocated increasing the Army's active duty manpower from 490,000 soldiers to 540,000--close to the levels the Army had at the height of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Such an increase would expand Army force structure by a third, from 30 to 40 brigade combat teams.

Trump advocated increasing the Navy from the currently planned 310 ships to 350, and presumably continuing recapitalization efforts of the nuclear submarine deterrent. He has embraced adding about 100 fighters to the Air Force, and increasing the number of Marine Corps infantry battalions by 50 percent while increasing the number of Marines to the highest levels since the Vietnam War.

All of this, of course, costs money--a lot of it. Cost calculations indicate that executing this program would require an increase to the defense budget of over $100 billion annually, a level $60 billion above President Obama's proposed defense spending level, one that is itself $30...