With 2015 budget, Pentagon looks beyond Afghanistan --- (Reuters) - The Pentagon unveiled a $496 billion base budget on Tuesday that looks beyond Afghanistan to future U.S. security challenges after a dozen years of war, cutting the military to afford more training and new weapons as it adapts to an era of tighter spending. -- The budget set the Obama administration on a collision course with Congress by trying to eliminate popular older weapons systems and curb military compensation while seeking $26.4 billion in additional defense spending to be paid for by closing tax loopholes and cutting mandatory spending. -- The spending plan released on Tuesday means the Pentagon's base budget for the 2015 fiscal year essentially would remain flat for a third consecutive year as the department responds to directions to cut nearly $1 trillion in spending over a decade. -- Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the budget "supports - and is informed by - our updated defense strategy" as outlined in the Quadrennial Defense Review, an examination of strategy and priorities that was released alongside the budget. -- "Today's world requires a strategy that is neither budget driven nor budget blind," he said in a statement. "We need a strategy that can be implemented with a realistic level of resources, and that is what this QDR provides." -- The two documents drew an immediate negative reaction on Capitol Hill. Representative Buck McKeon, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, expressed dismay at the shrinking security spending and flatly rejected the strategy review, vowing to make the Pentagon rewrite it. -- "The product the process produced this time has more to do with politics than policy and is of little value to decision-makers," McKeon said in a statement. -- Army General Martin Dempsey, the military's top uniformed officer, signed off on the strategic review as "appropriate to the resources available" but made no bones about the fact that it meant a "smaller and less capable military" that would make it more difficult to meet U.S. security obligations. -- The White House said the Pentagon's funding levels would enable the military to protect U.S. interests and execute the country's updated defense strategy, albeit with "somewhat increased levels of risk." -- The risks "would grow significantly" if higher budget cuts go into force in 2016 and beyond as planned, it said. --- The department increasingly has relied on that segment of the budget for funding operations and modernization related to the Afghanistan conflict because it is not subject to congressional budget caps. -- Todd Harrison, a defense analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said money included in the war-funding budget in 2014 largely offset the more than $30 billion in across-the-board cuts imposed on the base budget. -- He said Pentagon reliance on the war-funding budget was a "pretty dangerous situation" because once most U.S. forces withdraw from Afghanistan in December it will become more difficult to justify funding military operations through that supplemental measure. - More, at: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/04/us-usa-fiscal-defense-idUSBREA2328420140304