The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth has ordered senior leaders at the Pentagon and throughout the US military to develop plans for cutting 8% from the defense budget in each of the next five years, according to a memo obtained by the Washington Post.

Hegseth ordered the proposed cuts to be drawn up by 24 February, according to the memo, which includes a list of 17 categories that the Trump administration wants exempted. Among them: operations at the southern US border, modernization of nuclear weapons and missile defense and acquisition of one-way attack drones and other munitions. If adopted in full, the proposed cuts would include tens of billions of dollars in each of the next five years.

According to the Post, the memo calls for continued “support agency” funding for several major regional headquarters, including Indo-Pacific command, northern command and space command. Notably absent from that list is European command, which has had a leading role in executing US strategy during the war in Ukraine; central command, which oversees operations in the Middle East; and Africa command, which manages the several thousand troops the Pentagon has spread across that continent.