The Virginia-class submarine New Hampshire being built at Electric Boat in Groton, Conn., in August.

THE Providence Journal / Bill Murphy

WASHINGTON — The Navy will enjoy its biggest shipbuilding budget surge since the end of the Cold War — including money to speed production of submarines — under a $459.3-billion defense spending bill that President Bush signed into law this week.

The Pentagon spending bill for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 totals slightly less than Mr. Bush sought but it raises military pay and health benefits plus spending for the National Guard and reserves beyond what he requested. The bill also represents a hike of 9.5 percent – almost $40 billion — over the level of fiscal year 2007, continuing a strong upward trend in the defense budget since Mr. Bush took office.

The bill, which easily cleared the House and Senate last week and became law Tuesday, omits most of the emergency spending Mr. Bush seeks for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, leaving that emotional issue for Congress to resolve separately. Yesterday, the House took up a $50-billion bill that would finance the wars until February and require troop withdrawals to begin within a month.

Sen. Jack Reed said the war spending bill would come up as early as today in the Senate, where “really, it’s up to the Republicans” to decide whether to send it to the president. He has threatened to veto any war spending bill that — in the words of a statement from his budget office — “sets an arbitrary date to begin withdrawing American troops without regard to conditions on the ground or the recommendations of commanders in the field.”

The regular Defense Department spending bill — covering personnel, equipment, research, weapons buying and more — was a rare occasion for accord between the White House and the Democratic-majority Congress.

Reed portrayed the bill’s submarine accounts as a breakthrough for the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics, which shares construction of the Virginia-class attack sub with its longtime rival, Northrop Grumman Newport News of Virginia. Since the vessel class was created in the mid-1990s, the two shipbuilders have shared a construction diet of a single submarine per year, lobbying in vain for the funds to increase that production rate.

The new spending bill grants Mr. Bush’s request to build a single sub this year but adds $588 million to buy components for a nuclear-propulsion plant and other items that will enable the two builders to construct two subs per year beginning in 2010. That’s two years before the Navy had planned accelerating production to that level — which supporters of the undersea fleet see as essential to reversing the contraction of the fleet that began in the early 1990s.

Reed said it was also essential to the continued well-being of Electric Boat. He said the builder’s Quonset Point Shipyard is where construction of submarine hull sections begins. Electric Boat employs a total of 10,200 workers in Groton, Conn., and Rhode Island, of which 2,100 work in Rhode Island.

Counting the advance procurement funds for the submarine, the 2008 spending bill contains money for a total of 10 ships — 5 more than the administration had sought in the budget request to Congress early this year.

Besides the $588-million addition for subs, the bill adds these items to shipbuilding accounts:

•$300 million for three T-AKE cargo ships;

•$50 million for another LPD-17 transport ship;

•$339 million for the littoral combat ship, a program that the Navy has counted on for near-shore operations in the low-gauge conflicts the service sees as likely to predominate in the future.

But the fledgling program has been troubled by cost overruns, and the Congress and Mr. Bush settled on a sum significantly smaller than both had envisioned.

The bill also raises military pay by 3.5 percent across the board and significantly sweetens health care and other benefits — beyond the levels sought by the Pentagon. In addition, the bill bolsters spending for military hospitals

It also provides more than $15 billion for the purchase of mine-resistant vehicles for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Closer to home, Reed said that — beyond the money for accelerated submarine production — the spending bill includes about $50 million for defense projects that will benefit Rhode Island contractors. “These involve many small research and development and manufacturing companies that translate into good jobs at high salaries” for employees around the state.

For example, the bill includes $2.4 million for Rite Systems, of Middletown, to work on combat systems based on artificial intelligence. It includes $1.6 million for Systems Engineering Associates Corp., also known as SEA CORP, of Middletown, to work on an improved torpedo launcher for Navy surface ships.

Reed has been active for several years in efforts to prod the administration to change course in Iraq — an initiative that gathered momentum after the Democrats took control of the Congress after the 2006 elections.

However, Congress has failed in several attempts to impose troop withdrawal deadlines and mission changes on the president. Reed was co-author of such a measure that Mr. Bush vetoed last spring.

jmulligan@belo-dc.com