President Obama has proposed keeping the Pentagon budget essentially flat for the next 10 years. Mitt Romney, by contrast, wants to increase defense spending massively – by more than 50 percent over current levels, according to one estimate. That could mean almost $2 trillion in additional military spending over 10 years.
Romney hasn’t actually proposed a defense budget or offered any specific numbers for his military strategy. But he says he wants core defense spending to reach at least 4 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product – a big increase over the current level of about 3.2 percent. And he says the country needs about 100,000 more active-duty military personnel than the current 1.4 million, even though U.S. forces have left Iraq and have begun to withdraw from Afghanistan.