WASHINGTON — When the Pentagon unveils its budget request Monday for the next fiscal year, it will back away from a commitment it made to Congress just a year ago -- to estimate how much the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to cost.
Last year, for the first time since the wars began, department budget officials detailed war spending plans for the year ahead at the same time it told Congress what its normal operating expenses would be.
But this year, although the Pentagon will go into great detail about how it plans to spend the billions of dollars it gets to run its normal operations, it will include only what officials call a "place-holder" for war funding.
According to budget documents obtained by The Times, the Pentagon will request $515.4 billion for its normal budget -- a 7.5% increase over current levels -- including $183.8 billion for new weapons systems.
But it will request only $70 billion for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
With war costs running more than $12 billion a month, that funding would enable commanders to pay for the conflicts into the next presidential administration, but only briefly. The fiscal year begins Oct. 1.
More important, military budget analysts note, the war funding request will contain none of the details of where the Pentagon plans to spend its new cash. Critics have in the past accused the department of using war funding to buy weapons that should not be acquired through "emergency" spending bills -- including a new generation of high-end fighter planes.
"From a good-budgeting standpoint, they really should be requesting money for the full year, because you want to give your best-guess picture of what your overall plan is going to cost," said Steven M. Kosiak, a military budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan think tank. "When you only provide partial-year funding, that really does give a deceptive view of how much it's going to cost."
Pentagon officials say the main reason for the reversal is the difficulty of estimating force levels and operational tempo so far into the future. Last year's $142-billion estimate, for example, has been revised twice, to $189 billion, primarily to pay for the Iraq troop buildup -- the largest annual sum for the wars to date.
But Pentagon officials are also bitter that, despite last year's attempt to be more transparent in their war funding request, Congress did not respond by giving the department what it wanted. Of the $189 billion requested, $87 billion has been appropriated.
