House Armed Services Committee pushes through most of the Trump administration’s budget requests, absent some of the usual fights. But the return of sequester looms large in 2020.

The Pentagon’s Nuclear Posture Review remains the topic of debate on Capitol Hill, with Democrats and Republicans sparring over nuclear deterrence.

Pentagon planners aren’t only worried about North Korean ICBMs, but Chinese hypersonics and medium-range missiles. That means, according to analysts, that an array of distributed systems are needed to meet a wide range of potential threats.

In a hearing this morning, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Jack Reed, said he’s skeptical about the current plan to retire the JSTARS radar surveillance plane because the Air Force has been inconsistent, not just about JSTARS, but a host of other programs.

The Navy is going wobbly on its 355 ship fleet, but Capitol Hill doesn’t want to hear it.

Adm. Zukunft says he doesn’t want to return to the old culture of “martyrdom” when the service prided itself on doing more with less even as it ran its equipment and people into the ground.

“’20 and ’21 is where we need to make sure we don’t kind of hit turbulence,” McCarthy said. “The budget deal was great — we had an enormous increase, and we’re grateful for that — but this (sequestration) still looms.”

In a somewhat surreal scenario, President Trump yesterday riffed on the idea of a “Space Force,” something he’d clearly been briefed on at some point. And the Air Force expects new engines for the B-52 fleet to cost up to $8 billion.

It’s not often the public gets to — or chooses to — weigh in directly about what the defense budget should be. The folks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies gave anyone interested enough a chance to do just that. Read on to see what Mark Cancian, a member of our Board of Contributors, says about the results! The Editor.

Legislators will probably loosen some rules on federal spending to help the Pentagon cope with Congress’s failure to pass funding bills until six months into the fiscal year. Budget dysfunction has gotten so bad it’s forcing even the famously strict appropriations committees to loosen the reins after years of resistance.