The 2024 Army budget doesn’t contain big across-the-board increases, but the $185.5 billion request is enough to take care of the service’s top priorities, Army budget officials said March 23 at an Association of the U.S. Army event.

“All in all, we are very excited about our request,” said Maj. Gen. Mark Bennett, the 32nd director of the Army budget. He described the proposed budget as a “strategy-informed” document that supports the National Defense Strategy with investments for people and transformation programs.

It isn’t perfect, Bennett and John Daniels, deputy assistant Army secretary for plans, programs and resources, said at the Coffee Series event at AUSA’s headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. But the budget includes money for high-priority initiatives aimed at helping soldiers and their families and allocates funding for modernization and transformation projects based on how programs are progressing, they said.

The Army’s transformation priorities—long-range precision fires, next-generation combat vehicles, Future Vertical Lift, the network, air and missile defense and soldier lethality—have not changed and “remain constant,” Bennett said. “We looked really hard at when technology was going to mature,” and that review helped shape the budget details, he said.

“We didn’t get everything,” Daniels said about the budget. “We never can, but given the constraints we were given, I would say it is very, very good.”

Changes to the budget are expected as Congress writes defense policy and funding bills, but Bennett said he feels confident that the proposal would take care of uniformed and civilian workers and support defense and Army priorities.

Daniels added that the request supports the Army’s long-range transformation strategy, with a little rebalancing to take care of higher priorities. “There always is a bit of tension inside the equipment portfolio,” Daniels said. One decision was to earmark funding in areas where the Army had aging capabilities that need a quicker boost. “We are getting at some of the obsolescence issues,” Daniels said.