Donald Trump was in Annapolis today for the Naval Academy commencement.  Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst in Washington for the Center for Strategic and International Studies and who’s forgotten more than Trump will ever know about defense spending, wrote on Twitter he found six lies in Trump’s address, in just two minutes.

  • Error #1: The $700B defense budget for FY18 is not the largest ever. It was larger under the Obama administration: $710B in FY11 and $714B in FY10. And that’s without adjusting for inflation!
  • Error #2: The number of ships in the Navy today is not the smallest since the end of WWI. We have 283 ships today, and in 2007 (Bush administration) we had 279.
  • Error #3: The Navy will not get to 355 ships “very soon.” The Navy’s 30-year plan says it will not get to that level until after 2050, but it could possibly be accelerated to the 2030s. Either way, it’s not very soon.
  • Error #4: Getting to 355 ships is not an increase of “a couple of hundred” ships. Here’s the math: 355 – 283 = 72
  • Error #5: The 355-ship fleet has not yet been “approved.” The ships have not all been authorized yet, and Congress appropriates the money one year at a time.
  • Error #6: This year’s military pay raise is not the first in ten years. There were pay raises in each of the past ten years, & some were higher than this year’s raise.
  • FY09: 3.9%
  • FY10: 3.4%
  • FY11: 1.4%
  • FY12: 1.6%
  • FY13: 1.7%
  • FY14: 1.0%
  • FY15: 1.0%
  • FY16: 1.3%
  • FY17: 2.1%
  • FY18: 2.4%