Chief of Staff of the Army, General Mark Milley, assesses current requirements at 540,000 active-duty soldiers, which appears to be the Army’s favorite round number: It was also what the Army believed it needed in the mid-1990s, and what the Army believed it needed mid-term of the Obama administration. So it’s likely an institutionally comfortable number rather than a rigorously derived one.

Still, the 540,000 number cannot reasonably meet the very different demands of those three time frames. Planners at the end of the Cold War envisioned a strategic environment that entailed Russia integrating into the West, did not imagine the emergence of global terrorist threats, and under-emphasized the rise of an aggressive China as America’s peer. The early-2000s assessments were based on a Russia reset, the tide of wars receding, and China as a responsible stakeholder; none of those three planning parameters hold. Even without factoring in the president’s policies, objectively the international environment is increasing demands.

The president’s budget allots only a 3-percent increase in the coming fiscal year DOD spending. When out-year projections are taken into account, the Trump budget will add only $463-billion increase through 2027. Despite political grandstanding about the “historic” size of the increase and a pledge to rebuild America’s armed forces, that is a very modest bump, probably inadequate even to rebuild current readiness shortfalls.

Moreover, the Trump budget would drastically reduce the congressionally-approved slush fund called Overseas Contingency Operations. The OCO funds are off-budget, so are unconstrained by the Budget Control Act ceilings, and currently funnel an additional $64 billion to Defense. Despite Defense Secretary James Mattis testifying that preserving OCO funding was one of his top five budget priorities, the president’s budget would reduce the funding to only $12 billion by the end of the five-year Future Years Defense Program.

To make matters worse, the president has offered up a budget there is no reasonable possibility the Congress will enact, because it both exceeds BCA caps by $52 billion and pays for the modest increase in defense spending by violating the mandated dollar for dollar balance between domestic and defense spending. The former chair of the House Appropriations Committee, Republican Hal Rodgers, called it “politically impossible.” Mattis testified that his own budget fails to fund $33 billion in needed spending.

One bleak interpretation of the White House’s intention is that the administration is seeking to make it safe for Republicans to vote in favor of budgets that increase deficit spending. Under this theory, in order to get increases in defense, conservatives would swallow their concern about the debt and agree to increases in domestic spending. In short, the administration would be betting on budget hawks abjuring their principles. They would also be setting DOD up to be the villain as the only government activity whose spending is increasing, and that at the cost of other national priorities.