Jeff Martin breaks down 5 things that Defense News learned from the Pentagon's 2020 defense budget request.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army is asking for about $190 billion in fiscal 2020, an increase of roughly $8 billion above last year’s budget top line, which will cover the cost of the advent of an ambitious modernization plan, a defense official told Defense News ahead of the White House’s FY20 budget request release.

Breaking that top line down, the service is requesting roughly $120 billion in its base budget and then another $31 billion in Overseas Contingency Operations-for-base funding. The Army is asking for another $30 billion in traditional OCO funding — which is the account used to pay for wartime operations in theater — and another $10 billion to cover emergency funds, according to the source.

The budget is expected to be officially released March 12.

OCO-for-base funding is money that could be in the base budget, but is classified as OCO for the purpose of getting around statutory budget caps imposed by the Budget Control Act. Both Congress and the Pentagon have relied on OCO as a workaround for the budget caps in the past.

Army’s FY19 budget growing by 8 percent to fill readiness gaps, gradually grow force The Army’s FY19 budget request will grow by roughly 8 percent with boosts in munitions production, a gradual plan to increase troops and funding to fill capability gaps.

The Army’s request will be a part of the roughly $718 billion budget request the Pentagon will submit to Congress next week.The Defense Department plans to ask for $545 billion in the base budget, roughly $100 billion in OCO-for-base funding, about $64 billion in OCO dollars and approximately $9 billion in “emergency” funding that could be used to cover funding gaps in military construction that result from President Donald Trump’s move to use an emergency declaration to fund a wall at the United States’ southern border.

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While last year’s Army budget request saw an enormous $13 billion increase above the FY18 funding levels in order to recover from readiness decrements and fill out capability gaps, this budget builds upon the service’s big push to modernize its force significantly by 2028.

Force size

The Army’s yearly end-strength numbers, however, will slow, according to the official. The plan is to increase troop numbers by 2,000 a year.

Last year, at the time of the budget release, the active force size was 483,500 with a plan to increase the end-strength steadily by 4,000 a year for three years, ultimately reaching a force of 495,500 by 2021.

But after a bad recruiting year, the Army is slowing its growth to match the market, according to the official. The Army anticipates reaching 478,000 active troops by the end of this year.

The service will also spend the next 12 to 18 months studying force structure that could lead to big changes, but no major upheaval is afoot in FY20 or even in FY21, the official said.

Modernization money

Coming as no surprise, the Army’s biggest budget boosts will be in the Research, Development and Acquisition accounts.

The Army is requesting an additional $1 billion in the Research, Development, Test & Evaluation account for a total of $12.2 billion.

On the procurement side, the Army is cutting a sliver — roughly $200 million — for a total of $21.8 billion, mostly because the service is focused on prototyping future systems ahead of buying new equipment. Along with that is a plan to slow the procurement and upgrades of legacy systems.

The service has been holding what has been called “night court,” or a series of “deep dives” to assess how essential existing programs are compared to the service’s radical modernization goals throughout FY18. The Army found roughly $31 billion through the process of cutting and terminating existing programs and in future cost avoidance to apply to its new priorities.

According to Army leadership, if programs or activities didn’t fit in the top six modernization priorities the service laid out a year ago, then the programs could go, freeing up dollars to priorities.

The Army announced in 2017 at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference that it planned to stand up Army Futures Command, a new four-star organization tasked to push forward efforts within its priorities list that will modernize the Army by 2028. The six modernization priorities are Long-Range Precision Fires, Next-Generation Combat Vehicle, Future Vertical Lift, the network, air-and-missile defense, and soldier lethality.