Pentagon to seek $524B baseline budget

WASHINGTON, Nov. 19 (UPI) -- The Pentagon will be asking the U.S. Congress for its biggest-ever baseline budget next year: $524 billion, military sources say.

That exceeds the U.S. Defense Department's fiscal 2009 baseline budget by $9 billion. But the figure doesn't include a planned $57 billion in supplemental spending requests for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, unnamed sources told CNN Wednesday.

The supplemental war spending would be down from this year's figure of $70 billion, so when the baseline and supplemental figures for both years are included, the total Pentagon budget request for fiscal 2010 is actually $4 billion lower than last year, CNN said.