Tony Capaccio
Bloomberg
President Barack Obama will seek $75.5 billion more for combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through the end of this fiscal year, according to three people familiar with the request.
It will be submitted along with the fiscal 2010 budget Obama sends to Congress tomorrow. That proposal will request $130 billion for the wars in fiscal 2010 in addition to a total Defense Department budget of about $534 billion, the people said.
The amounts for the wars are less than Defense Secretary Robert Gates asked for and in keeping with expectations that the president plans a major reduction of the 142,000 U.S. troops now in Iraq.
The extra funding for fiscal 2009, which ends Sept. 30, includes money for adding 17,000 troops to the U.S. force of 38,000 in Afghanistan.
