As President Bush prepares to leave office in just three months, the budget group at the Pentagon is planning to propose a huge budget increase to the team that replaces them.

Bradley Berkson, the Pentagon's director of program analysis and evaluation, confirmed that defense budget officials are preparing spending plans for the next six years that add approximately $60 billion a year to the base military budget.

That would raise the 2010 base defense budget to $587 billion, up from the previously proposed $527 billion. Over six years this proposal would add $360 billion to Pentagon spending.

In addition to the base budget for 2010, the Defense Department will need supplemental funding to keep fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wartime supplementals have been adding approximately $150 billion a year to total defense spending.

Each February, the Defense Department sends Congress a defense budget request for the next year and a future year defense program that projects defense spending for six years into the future. The funds are said to needed because the U.S. military is adding 92,000 soldiers and Marines. The additional troops will require operations and maintenance support and capital support — which is to say the money to maintain equipment, to train troops and to buy new weapons.

By adding $60 billion a year to the long-range defense spending plan, the outgoing administration hopes to pressure the new administration to boost military spending that was scheduled to level off after a decade of substantial increases. Then any defense spending proposal that is lower than Bush's 11th-hour bulked-up budget could be assailed as a defense spending cut.

How seriously this will be taken by the next administration is unknown.

Bush's successor will undoubtedly conduct a careful examination of the military to determine how much money is needed in the base budget, how much extra is needed for the wars and what kind of a military is needed for the future.

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