United States Defense Secretary Ash Carter gave a very important address Tuesday. He previewed the “FY 2017 Defense Budget”.

He started out with a “thanks”, then dropped the word “wonderful” twice in describing the department he oversees … and then he went through how they’ll successfully manage to spend over a half a trillion dollars — $582.7 billion to be exact — in one year.

He prefaced the speech by saying that he was going to go over investments and “overarching themes”, as if the DoD is about to teach Hemingway or Faulkner.

Nevertheless, these are the big chunks of the address we think are most important and telling (to read it in its entirety, simply click here) …

On reenergized, potentially dangerous superpowers:

First is in Europe, where we’re taking a strong and balanced approach to deter Russian aggression, and we haven’t had to worry about this for 25 years; while I wish it were otherwise, now we do.  Second is in the Asia-Pacific, where China is rising and where we’re continuing and will continue our rebalance, so-called, to maintain the stability in the region that we have underwritten for 70 years and that’s allowed so many nations to rise and prosper and win.  That’s been our presence.

Third challenge is North Korea – a hardy perennial – a threat to both us and to our allies, and that’s why our forces on the Korean Peninsula remain ready every single day, today, tomorrow, to, as we call it, fight tonight.

Iran is the fourth challenge, because while the nuclear deal was a good deal and doesn’t limit us in the Defense Department in any way – none of its provisions affect us or limit us – we still have to counter Iran’s malign influence against our friends and allies in the region, especially Israel.

On taking on ISIS (the Islamic State, IS, ISIL, Daesh, etc.):

As I said a couple of weeks ago at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and in Paris a week and a half ago, and as I’ll reiterate when I meet with my coalition counterparts in Brussels next week, we must and we will defeat ISIL.

Because we are accelerating the campaign, DOD is backing that up and we need to back it up in our budget with a total of $7.5 billion in 2017, 50 percent more than in 2016.  This will be critical as our updated coalition military campaign plan kicks in.

For example, we’ve recently been hitting ISIL with so many GPS-guided smart bombs and laser-guided rockets that we’re starting to run low on the ones that we use against terrorists the most.  So we’re investing $1.8 billion in F.Y. ’17, to buy over 45,000 more of them.

We’re also investing to maintain more of our 4th generation fighter and attack jets that we previously planned, including the 810, which has been devastating to ISIL from the air. The budget defers the A-10’s final retirement until 2022, replacing it with F-35 Joint Strike Fighters on a squadron-by-squadron basis, so we’ll always have enough aircraft for today’s conflicts.

On R&D (which they codenamed “SCO” — Strategic Capabilities Office), which includes advanced navigation, “swarming autonomous vehicles”, gun-based missile defense systems, electromagnetic gun and something called the “arsenal plane”, which takes old platforms and turns them each into a “flying launchpad for all sorts of different conventional payloads”:

As we drive this work for the budget, grows our research and development accounts for the second year in a row, investing a total of $71.4 billion in R&D in 2017 — a number that no other institution in the United States or the world comes close to.

On subs:

One of these is undersea capabilities, where we continue to dominate and where the budget invests over $8.1 billion in 2017 and more than $40 billion over the next five years to give us the most lethal undersea and any submarine force in the world.  It buys more advanced maritime control aircraft.  And it not only buys nine of our most advanced Virginia-class attack submarines over the next five years; it also equips –more of them with the versatile Virginia Payload Module, which triples each submarine platform’s strike capacity from 12 Tomahawk missiles to 40.

On “cyber”:

We’re also investing more in cyber, totaling nearly $7 billion in 2017, and almost $35 billion over the next five years.  Among other things, this will help to further DOD’s network defenses, which is critical; build more training ranges for our cyber warriors; and also develop cyber tools and infrastructure needed to provide offensive cyber options.

On space, as in outer space, as in galaxies:

I also want to mention space because at times in the past, space was seen as a sanctuary, new and emerging threats make clear that that’s not the case anymore and we must be prepared for the possibility of a conflict that extends in space.  Last year we added over $5 billion in new investments to make us better postured for that.  And then in 2017 we’re doing even more, enhancing our ability to identify, attribute and negate all threatening actions in space.  For so many commercial space endeavors, we want this domain to be just like the oceans and the Internet: free and safe for all.

On promises, and trying not to waste all the money:

Just like you have your shareholders, we have our taxpayers, and we owe it to them to ensure that we’re doing everything we can to spend our defense dollars as wisely and responsibly as possible.

That’s why, along with our budget, we are keeping us our focus on, for examples, acquisition reform.  We are already starting to see results from our better buying power initiatives, and we are looking to do more and get better.  We are also doing more to reduce overhead, which we expect to help nearly eight — provide us more than $8 billion over the next five years – eight billion dollars that we can use elsewhere for real capability and not overhead.  And we’re looking at reforms to the Goldwater-Nichols Act, the famous act of the 1980s, that defines much of DOD’s institutional organization. On this last point, we’ve been doing a thorough review for the last several months, and I expect to begin receiving recommendations on that in coming weeks and making decisions.

Okay, so it’s not a line-by-line report of how that immense amount of money will be spent (did you really expect one? We hope not) but Carter does provide an idea. Right?

In the immutable words of Lloyd Christmas, “$71.4 billion alone on R&D, might want to hold onto that one!“