One of President Trump’s first jobs in office was to issue an executive order directing James Mattis, Secretary of Defence, to conduct a 30- day review of readiness of the armed forces.
This comes off the back of the Heritage Foundation’s 2017 index of US military strength giving an overall assessment of capability as ‘marginal, trending towards weak’ putting this down to many years of budget cuts and overuse.
It also noted that the US Army is the smallest it has been since World War One, the air force suffers from a crippling shortage of pilots and maintenance staff, as well as ageing planes, which have an average age of 27 years. President Trump has now given the green light to Mattis and the director of the office of budget and management not only to request new emergency military funding in 2017 but also to revise the yet-to-be released budget for 2018.
