Pentagon expands funds to bomb Daesh, counter Russia

US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter speaks at The Economic Club of Washington in Washington, DC, February 2, 2016. (photos by AFP)

The Pentagon has planned to substantially increase its military budget to battle the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group in 2017.

US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, making the announcement in Washington, DC on Tuesday, said, "Because we are accelerating the [anti-Daesh] campaign, Department of Defense is backing that up and we need to back it up in our budget with a total of $7.5 billion in 2017, fifty percent more than in 2016."

He added, "This will be critical as our updated coalition military campaign plan kicks in."

Further reviewing the huge budget, Carter referred to drones and warplanes at the forefront of an 18-month-old coalition effort to allegedly fight ISIL in Iraq and Syria.

"We've recently been hitting ISIL with so many GPS-guided smart bombs and laser-guided rockets that we're starting to run low on the ones we use against terrorists the most," he said, "So we're investing $1.8 billion in 2017 to buy over 45,000 more of them."

The Daesh Takfiri terrorists execute dozens of captured Iraqi security forces at an unknown location in Iraq's Salaheddin province on June 14, 2014. 

Gruesome violence has plagued the northern and western parts of Iraq ever since the Daesh Takfiris launched an offensive in June 2014, and took control of portions of Iraqi territory.

The terrorist group has also been wreaking havoc on Syria, where the country has been gripped by deadly violence since March 2011.

Countering Russia

Carter also proposed allocating $3.4 billion, quadrupling last year's amount, to increase US presence in Eastern Europe and to counter “Russia’s aggression.”

The budget allegedly aims to deter Russia from carrying out land grabs after the 2014 reunification of the Crimean Peninsula.

"We're reinforcing our posture in Europe to support our NATO allies in the face of Russia's aggression,"  Carter said. "That'll fund a lot of things; more rotational US forces in Europe, more training and exercises with our allies, more pre-positioned war fighting gear, and infrastructure improvements to support it."

Meanwhile, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg welcomed a beefed-up US presence in countries close to the Russian border, saying in a statement that the move is "a clear sign of the enduring commitment by the United States to European security."

The total US defense budget for fiscal year 2017 would be nearly $583 billion, far surpassing that of any other country and exceeding the combined defense spending of the next eight biggest military states across the globe, according to Carter.


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