Trump wants to cut defence spending!! Surely some mistake.

With all the Trumpery goings-on one bizarre decision by the president has slipped through without major fanfare. He actually wants to CUT the Pentagon's future budget. Having blasted from his soap box that he planned to rebuild America's armed forces and make them better and bigger, he has told the Pentagon chief Jim Mattis that he wants a cut of $33 billion in his planned spending for fiscal year 2020 - the year of the presidential election!! He is suddenly worried about the steeply rising national deficit and wants all government departments, including the Pentagon, to cut expenditure by five per cent. For the Defence Department that means reducing planned expenditure in 2020 from $733 billion to $700 billion. That's a lot of jobs and equipment and training and maintenance and readiness that's going to be negatively affected. It's back to the bad old ways, salami-slicing cuts to the defence budget to meet deficit problems. Obama was a nightmare with his constant cutting, forcing the Pentagon to reduce the size of the individual forces by thousands of troops. When Trump became president he vowed to change all that and gave the Pentagon a big boost in spending last year, with substantial pay rises for service personnel. But reality has set in. I can see big battles ahead in Congress and trouble for Trump as he gets closer to 2020, as if he hasn't got enough problems on his plate over the next two years. Slashing defence spending in the very year he is trying to be reelected for a second term will be a gift for the Democrat rivals, even though they would probably approve cuts in the military. But the fact is in this dangerous world where technology is moving at such a fast speed, it is perilous to start cutting back on key programmes such as hypersonic weapons, cyber warfare, and training, training, training. China will be very happy to see the Pentagon cutting back. So will Putin.