Recognizing the nation's responsibility to support its men and women in uniform and their families, President Barack Obama will request increased funding for military pay, housing allowances, family support programs and care for wounded warriors, White House officials said Tuesday.

The budget request, expected to be released Feb. 1, will include a 1.4 percent basic pay raise officials say is designed to keep military pay increases in line with those in the private sector. The request also will include an average housing allowance increase of 4.2 percent, as well as a variety of enlistment and re-enlistment bonuses and monthly payments for specialty skills.

Family support programs will grow 3 percent if Congress approves the request - to $8.8 billion.  The request will include $1.3 billion to make affordable, high-quality child care services more available at 800 military child development centers stateside and overseas.

Expanded counseling and assistance services to be funded in the new budget will help families meet the challenges of repeated deployments and family separations, officials noted. The president will request $1.9 billion for these services, which range from financial counseling to transition and relocation assistance, up $37 million from fiscal 2010 funding.

In addition, the request will include $84 million for enhanced career and educational opportunities for military spouses through tuition assistance and federal internship programs.

Another provision in the request will provide $439 million to build 10 new Department of Defense Education Activity schools.

The fiscal 2011 budget request includes: $30.9 billion overall for medical care, up 5.8 percent from current levels; $669 million to provide TBI and psychological health care; and $250 million for continued mental-health and TVI research.

The budget request provides $262 million for the Labor Department's Veterans Employment and Training Service.  This includes $5 million for a new initiative to help homeless women veterans and homeless families.

Another effort, to provide more employment workshops for spouses of separating servicemembers, will receive $1 million in the president's budget request.

The budget request also seeks to expand veterans' access to medical care, officials noted. Obama will request $50.6 billion in advance appropriations for the VA medical care program to ensure veterans' care isn't interrupted due to budget delays.  For the first time, highly disabled veterans who are medically retired from the military will be eligible to receive both VA disability benefits and military retirement benefits. By 2015, all medically retired servicemembers will be eligible to receive concurrent benefits, officials said.

The fiscal 2011 budget request also provides funds to continue enrolling more than 500,000 veterans with moderate income into the VA health care system by 2011.

Another measure in the request funds technology to improve the timely, high-quality delivery of health care and benefits, officials said. The Defense Department and VA are implementing the Joint Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record - essentially an electronic medical record that will follow a servicemember from initial enlistment through retirement or separation and transition to the VA system.

The request also includes more than $200 million in automated processing to directly improve both the accuracy and timeliness of the delivery of veterans benefits - particularly disability compensation and the new Post-9/11 GI Bill benefit, officials said.