WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has been conducting a "running reset" on its aircraft, ships, nuclear assets and ground vehicles over the past two years due to the limits placed on defense spending by the Budget Control Act (BCA), senior defense leaders said Monday, but the fiscal 2016 budget request looks to kick-start the modernization process in a big way.

And that push is being funded in part by an additional $21 billion added to the 2016 budget request aimed specifically at that modernization.

"This budget is the best balance of ends, ways and means that we could possibly achieve given the level of resources" available, said Deputy Defense Secretary of Defense Bob Work at an afternoon briefing with reporters. "And this is especially true with regard to maintaining our technological superiority in the 21st century."

Complete coverage of the fiscal 2016 budget request

Work said that this "deferred modernization problem" of the past several years has caused the department to try and "tackle it in this budget and we need help above sequestration caps to do so … we think this is the right budget."

The $534 billion budget, which rips right past the BCA's $499 billion spending cap, is part of a larger five-year spending plan that will go $155 billion over the caps imposed by Congress and signed off on by the White House.

Read the Plan: Fiscal Year 2016 Budget Request

But Work said that the Pentagon must spend over the caps to allow the department to execute the national defense strategy with manageable risk, or else the force "will become brittle and more prone to breaking."

Any reduction for funding that is below the $534 billion request , he claimed, "will make the overall risk to the strategy unmanageable" he claimed. "The best way to say it is we've been surviving, but not thriving, over the past three years," under the BCA.

The DoD does have some big bills coming due in the coming years with the nuclear deterrent force preparing for an expensive modernization plan in the 2020s and into the 2030s, and billions in classified spending on space capabilities to add more resilience to a satellite fleet increasingly under threat from jamming and hostile actions by from China and other peer competitors.threats.

Depot Backlog

"All the services to some degree have a depot backlog" that they're trying to work through in order to modernize their platforms, added Lt. Gen. Mark Ramsay, director of force structure and resources on the Joint Staff.

The plan is to get the services back up to "full spectrum readiness" by 2020, he said, which means they are trained and equipped to engage in a full, joint operations against a determined peer foe.

The Air Force is "taking a little bit of near-term risk" by investing in other programs, he said, but the service expects to be in balance by 2023. Part of the reason is that the air war in Iraq and Syria is "eating up a lot of Air Force" assets, while many ISR platforms that the service thought were coming home from Afghanistan have been redirected to Iraq and Syria.

In a Feb. 2 statement, Joint Chiefs Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey said the the budget request "represents the minimum resource level necessary to remain a capable, ready and appropriately sized force able to meet our global commitments."

When it comes to most of the major programs, "there is little new" in this budget that most analysts didn't see coming, said Mackenzie Eaglen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

While the Obama administration has ignored the budget caps every year since passage of BCA, "what is unique this time around is that we don't know where the base budget topline will end up" in the absence of a budget deal in Congress that at least temporarily erases the BCA caps.

Eaglen doesn't anticipate even any last-minute modified BCA amendment bill to bring the cap as being as high as the administration's request, but "if the past is prologue, defense will end up somewhere between $515 [billion] to $525 billion in base enacted spending" for 2016.

Few analysts expect Congress to be any more amenable to most of the savings initiatives put forth by that the White House, has put forth, including the retirement of the A-10 and compensation reform, with the exception of the Army aviation restructure.

"One interesting note of honesty in the request is the that Pentagon's admission that there is $20 [billion] to $30 billion in base spending funded through [supplemental war funding] in '16," Eaglen added.

"The problem is they will not be able to begin migrating those funds to the base next year as they're assuming now absent a budget deal that fully funds Obama's request this year and next, and that is unlikely."

The center for American Progress's Katherine Blakeley added in a statement that, "by keeping these 'legacy' costs out of the base budget, which is already $38 billion over the sequester caps, the administration is delaying the real decisions about trade-offs of defense costs and capabilities that we need to have."

When it comes to forging a deal with Congress, President Obama on Monday said, that "I'm not going to accept a budget that locks in sequestration going forward. It would be bad for our security and bad for our growth."

Email: pmcleary@defensenews.com

Twitter: @paulmcleary

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