WASHINGTON, Oct. 31 (UPI) -- The next president of the United States, to be elected Tuesday, is going to face a lot of hard choices on the defense front over the next four years, especially in the areas of budgeting and procurement.

The defense budget situation that U.S. President George W. Bush inherited eight years ago could not have been more different from the one he bequeaths to his successor. The United States was at peace, Russia -- the successor state to the Soviet Union -- was still impoverished and eager to cultivate good relations with Washington. Oil prices, while climbing, were still in the $20 a barrel to $30 a barrel range. The United States government was wracking up $150 billion a year in budgetary surpluses. The conventional weapons systems of the United States were unmatched anywhere in the world.

Today, however, all of those conditions are reversed. The United States continues to wrack up the largest annual budget deficits and balance of payments trade deficits per year in its history and the largest in the world.

The Bush administration spent unprecedented, enormous sums on waging the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It poured vast sums into ballistic missile defense programs that have produced some embryo systems that could and should be effective, as planned, against any intercontinental ballistic missile attack from so-called "rogue" nations like Iran and North Korea, or even against a nuclear strike from China's still limited strategic ICBM forces.

However, no technologically or deployable, credible deterrent system yet exists in the United States or anywhere else in the world that could defend America or any other nation from an attack by Russia's Strategic Missile Forces, or by U.S. strategic forces, with their hundreds of missiles and multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicle -- MIRV -- missile technology.

Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, defense secretary for the first six years of the president's two terms in office, plowed unprecedented enormous sums into the research and development of space military systems, ballistic missile defenses and visionary concepts like the Future Combat Systems program.

But Rumsfeld and his top lieutenants at the same time woefully ignored the growing need to replace the U.S. Air Force's half-century-old fleet of Boeing KC-135 aerial tankers. Eventually, the U.S. Air Force decided on the KC-45 air tanker, built by the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co. and by Northrop Grumman over the Boeing KC-767. But this contact was set aside by the U.S. Congress following a heavily critical report on the USAF procurement process from the Government Accountability Office. The next president and secretary of defense will have to resolve this issue as well.

Progress on developing the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II combat aircraft proved ever more expensive and slow. Meanwhile, the age of the F-15 and F-16 fleet in operational service has approached or exceeded three decades. Russian cruise missiles fly at Mach 2.8, or almost three times the speed of sound. They are at least three times faster than America's aging Tomahawk cruise missile program. The Tomahawk is subsonic. But there are no plans to replace the Tomahawk with systems comparable to the Russian ones in the near future.

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(In Part 2: Deciding what programs to cut.)