President Trump's $603 billion budget proposal for defense won't be enough to pay for the massive buildup in military might that he envisions, experts say.

But there’s also debate about whether the larger $640 billion proposed by defense hawks in Congress is necessary, with some experts saying the "readiness crisis" that number is meant to address may be exaggerated.

"The amount of defense funding you need should be determined by strategy and what you want the military to be able to do,” said Todd Harrison, director of defense budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The Trump administration has not given us a clear defense strategy, so it's difficult to judge [whether $603 billion is enough] if you don’t know what the defense strategy is."

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The Trump administration said this week that it will propose a $603 billion base defense budget, $54 billion above current budget caps.

The administration has not elaborated on what specifically that will fund. But Trump has talked since the campaign of a massive military buildup.

Under his plans, the Navy would grow from 274 ships to 350, the Army would get another 60,000 soldiers, the Marines would have 36 battalions and the Air Force would get at least 100 more combat aircraft.

After revealing his budget proposal, Trump reiterated his plans for a buildup throughout the week. In a speech Thursday aboard the soon-to-be commissioned U.S.S Gerald R. Ford supercarrier, Trump vowed a 12-carrier Navy, up from the current 10 carriers. That number would also fit with a 350-ship fleet.

But defense hawks in Congress say the $603 billion Trump is proposing won’t make enough progress toward Trump’s goals.

Instead, the hawks, led by Armed Services Chairmen Sen. John McCain John Sidney McCainKelly's lead widens to 10 points in Arizona Senate race: poll COVID response shows a way forward on private gun sale checks Trump pulls into must-win Arizona trailing in polls MORE (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), are pushing a $640 billion base budget they say is necessary to address an urgent readiness crisis.

They point to testimony from the service chiefs and vice chiefs to say, for example, that nearly two-thirds of the Navy’s F-18s can’t fly and just three of the Army’s 58 brigade combat teams have all the troops, training and equipment they need to fight at a moment’s notice.

On Wednesday, Thornberry gave reporters two charts showing what he said could hypothetically be left out of a $603 billion defense budget.

His examples included $10.9 billion for 33 F-35s, 24 F-18s and service life extensions for F-16s; $15.1 billion for increased ground force capabilities such as army combat vehicle modernization; $4.9 billion for naval readiness activities such as increased ship operations; and $3.9 billion for facilities maintenance.

Harrison said Thornberry’s examples are “perfectly valid.” Still, he said there are a number of unknowns that must be answered before specific line items can be more than hypothetical.

First, the Trump administration hasn’t said what it’s going to do with a war fund known as the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account. The OCO account is not subject to budget caps and so in recent years has been expanded to pay for items considered base budget needs, drawing consternation from fiscal conservatives and Democrats.

The Obama administration had projected $60 billion for OCO for fiscal 2018. But Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, was an opponent of OCO funding as a congressman.

As such, it’s unclear whether the administration will stick with Obama’s number, go lower to address Mulvaney’s longtime concerns or go higher to fund more of Trump’s military buildup.

Second, it’s unclear whether the administration will make cuts from other parts of the defense budget to redirect money towards buying more ships, troops and planes.

“Barring some miracle efficiency saving, Trump’s not going to be able to increase the size of the military like he said he was going to,” Harrison said.

Harrison predicted most of the $54 billion above budget caps in Trump’s base budget would go to items generally considered part of readiness, including more troops, more training and maintenance backlogs.

“Whatever’s left over will be sprinkled around to a few high priority acquisition programs,” he said.

But it’s up for debate how serious the military’s readiness problems actually are. For example, the Army’s statistic of just three of 58 brigade combat teams (BCT) meeting readiness requirements could mean that just a few people weren’t trained within a certain timeframe, Harrison said. If those people were moved around, he added, more brigade combat teams would be ready.

“They’re doing this deliberately to make the problem look like a crisis,” he said. “What they should tell us instead is, of the 58 BCTs, the last time they had to do maneuvers, how many were graded as substandard? How did they perform? Even if they didn’t have all the training, maybe they still performed OK.”

But Dakota Wood, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said both the data and the anecdotal evidence for readiness issues are strong.

“The number of airplanes sitting on the tarmac that are physically not able to fly or that people are not there to fly, the extended deployments of Navy ships…Eventually it has to come into port, and you’ve taken another ship out of the cycle and that increases the workload on the remaining people,” Wood said. “We’re in a death spiral, in that, as funding remains limited to the [Budget Control Act] in particular, things get broken, and they stay broken."

The extent of the issues has been masked thus far, he said, because operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have been able to be sustained. But even that can’t last, he added.

“The realities that we’re talking about are just so apparent,” he said.

Wood called Trump’s proposed $603 billion a “good first step” toward fixing the issues, acknowledging that Trump has to contend with other competing interests, such as keeping down the national debt.

“I wish it were more,” he added. “I think $640 [billion] is more accurate in terms of what is needed by the services.”

He predicted the fiscal 2018 budget would use the money for more equipment such as F-35s and F-18s. He also predicted Defense Secretary James Mattis will place an emphasis on budget certainty, such as ordering more hardware at one time, which drives the cost per unit down.

Gordon Adams, who oversaw defense budgets at the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton administration, said Trump’s $603 billion defense budget right now is more symbolic than anything, since it lacks key details.

“As to which part of the Goldilocks formula does it fit, there’s not really a good answer right now,” he said. “The content here is less important than the assertion that Trump is making that we have to be bigger, badder, tougher than the rest of world.”