An inside source explains the logic behind the 2020 budget’s most controversial call.

The new approach will focus on an urgent but largely unmet threat: Russian and Chinese cruise missiles.

“These are engines that would fit on your tabletop,” said Kratos exec Stacey Rock. “We don’t want hundreds of ‘em, we want thousands [of drones] to overwhelm the threat.”

The move could save more than $30 billion over 25 years to invest in high-tech weapons — but Congress is sure to explode in outrage.

That’s $6 billion more than previously announced — but it all comes at the cost of almost 200 cut, cancelled, or slowed-down programs, each with backers in Congress.

The Pentagon has quietly asked defense contractors for ways to spot enemy missile launchers — so the US can destroy them before they even fire.

Will high-tech hardware developed to protect aircraft translate to the mud and dust of ground combat?

“We’ve spent a lot of time over the past years playing defense,” Rear Adm. Ronald Boxall, director of surface warfare, said at the West 2019 conference here. “The best defense is a good offense, and the idea that we will go after the threat — at range — is something that we have to be able to do.”

The Pentagon has almost completed a study of how to shoot down hypersonic missiles. It’s also developing new offensive weapons — conventional, not nuclear — whose deployment will become legal with the end of the INF Treaty.

“For far too long, Russia has violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with impunity,” a statement from the White House said. Moscow has refused to admit that it has for years been “covertly developing and fielding a prohibited missile system that poses a direct threat to our allies and troops abroad.”