After years of demands for cut in military expenses following end of the Cold War, American lawmakers are now demanding an increase in spending on defence and weapons to ensure the United States can fight a war on at least two fronts simultaneously.

The Kosovo conflict has brought out the limitation of the American military and its equipment and, therefore, spending on newer and improved weapons is getting increasing support.

That naturally makes military contractors and weapons manufacturers happy and they stress their point that they need to get sustainable rate of spending.

According to the New York Times, the money earmarked in the defence budget for weapons is as much as $53 billion next year and $60 billion the following year.

Last year, the amount was only $44 billion, lowest in more than a decade.

The fighting in Kosovo,analysts have been quoted as saying, will only strengthen the case for increasing weapons spending when the congress takes up the budget this summer.

The Times quoted representative Duncan Hunter, who heads the procurement subcommittee of the House armed services committee, as saying, ``Folks who used to vote to cut defence budget massively are now voting to deploy our military more and more.''

The spending increases will be used to replenish stocks of ships and aircraft, radar jammers and missiles whose stocks are said to at a dangerously low level.

After the money is sanctioned, lobbying will start for the types of weapons on which it should be spent.

However, the Times said, much was already clear -- most of the transport, weapons and ordinance now in use in Kosovo was no longer actively produced. These include the C-5 transport plane, the B-2 bomber and Tomahawk cruise missiles.

So the need for a new generation of material and money to pay for it represent the best businessopportunity in years for the military contractors, the newspaper said.

``Kosovo underscored what the industry has been saying -- that we need to get to a sustainable rate of spending,'' Daniel T Burnham, chief executive of the Raytheon company which made the Tomahawk missiles, was quoted as saying.

``We need to get 60 billion dollars in weapons outlays. We are now on that path. And we are getting there faster than we first thought,'' he said.