Cutting Defense: Obama, Gates Say No
Robert Dreyfuss
February 16, 2011
President Obama and Secretary of Defense Gates are defending the
indefensible, namely, defense. Against clamor to cut the Pentagon's bloated
budget coming from both the right and the left, from anti-DOD liberals,
antiwar activists, ultra-conservative Tea Party types who want to slash all
government spending and libertarians who propose cutting defense by 90
percent, the White House and Gates are sounding like, well, reactionaries.
Gates, who'd earlier warned that even modest cuts in the 2011 budget for
defense could be "catastrophic," said today that the result of cutting
Pentagon spending could be "tragic":
"We still live in a very dangerous and often unstable world. We shrink from
our global security responsibilities at our peril. Retrenchment brought
about by short-sighted cuts could well lead to costlier and more tragic
consequences later-indeed as they have in the past."
Testifying in front of the House Armed Services Committee, Gates-a
right-wing Republican held over from the George W. Bush administration-also
said:
"We shrink from our global security responsibilities at our peril. Drastic
reductions in the size and strength of the US military make armed conflict
all the more likely-with an unacceptably high cost in American blood and
treasure."
Those remarks will resonate with the charter members of the
military-industrial complex and its Iron Triangle in Congress, the
bipartisan stooges of Boeing, Northup-Grumman, Lockheed Martin and the rest,
including John Boehner, who's busily defending makers of a military jet
engine that no one, not even Obama and Gates, wants, simply because it's
made in Ohio not far from the Congressional district he represents.
Others beg to disagree, however.
There's a consensus developing that the Defense Department, in 2011 and
especially in the next budget, for 2012, will take some substantial hits.
Despite the Iron Triangle (defense manufacturers and lobbyists, the generals
and the members of Congressional appropriations committees), the broader
Congress is looking at the Pentagon for big savings. Yesterday, I asked
Gordon Adams of the Stimson Center, who's spent many years suggesting
Pentagon reforms and cuts, whether the current Congress might take a big
bite out of Defense. "It's startlingly likely," he said, noting that he's
seeing the start of a tug of war between the appropriations and
authorization committees for DOD, which are usually lock-step in support of
the Pentagon, and the rest of Congress, which has cuts in mind. Plus, he
said, polls show that at least 55 percent of American voters prefer that
Congress cut defense rather than Medicare and Social Security. Larry Korb,
of the Center for American Progress, a Republican and a former Defense
Department official, said that polls show the public would support cuts of
$100 billion a year or more.
Obama and Gates, in their budget, propose to spend $553 billion in 2012, not
including funding for Iraq and Afghanistan, which adds another $118 billion
to DOD, for a total of $681 billion. To mollify critics, in his five-year
projection through 2016, Gates has proposed cutting a total of $78 billion
in projected growth. But that's sleight of hand: Gates isn't proposing to
reduce spending, just slightly modify the staggering expansion of DOD
spending over the years between 2012 and 2016. In all, projections show that
in the coming decade defense spending will total more than $6 trillion, and
that's not counting Afghanistan and other wars that might be fought. Many
analysts have argued that DOD spending could be drastically reduced without
the "tragic" results Gates complains about. As I've written for The Nation,
the Cato Institute has proposed cuts amounting to 20 percent, or about $1.2
trillion, over that span. Similarly, Barney Frank (D.-Mass.), Ron Paul
(R.-Tex.) and the Sustainable Defense Task Force have identified $960
billion in cuts over the next ten years.
Adams says that even Gates's projected savings of $78 billion is "soft,"
since it comes from things such as questionable estimates of inflation rates
and future predictions that aren't at all certain. He notes that between
1985 and 1998, the total number of US troops fell by 700,000, the number of
civilian employees by 300,000, spending on procurement of weapons fell by
half, and overall defense spending was slashed by 30 percent. There are
plenty of analysts who argue that similar, or even sharper cuts, are
possible now.
"We're on the edge of a build-down," says Adams. "And the build-down is
inevitable."
***
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27487.htm
Obama's Budget: Freezing the Poor
By Amy Goodman
February 16, 2011 "TruthDig" -- President Barack Obama unleashed his
proposed 2012 budget this week, pronouncing, proudly: "I've called for a
freeze on annual domestic spending over the next five years. This freeze
would cut the deficit by more than $400 billion over the next decade,
bringing this kind of spending-domestic discretionary spending-to its lowest
share of our economy since Dwight Eisenhower was president."
Focus on the word "freeze." That is exactly what many people might do,
if this budget passes as proposed. While defense spending increases, with
the largest Pentagon funding request since World War II, the budget calls
for cutting in half a program called Low Income Home Energy Assistance
Program, or LIHEAP.
LIHEAP offers block grants to states so they can offer financial
assistance to low-income households in order to meet home energy needs,
mostly for heating. Most of its recipients are the elderly and disabled. The
program is currently funded at more than $5 billion. Obama is calling for
that to be slashed to $2.57 billion-roughly half. This life-or-death
program, which literally can help prevent people from freezing to death,
represents less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the proposed $3.7 trillion
annual budget.
Compare this with the proposed military budget. "Defense spending" is
a misnomer. Until 1947-48, the Pentagon was officially, and appropriately,
called the War Department. In the proposed budget released on Valentine's
Day, the Department of Defense request is $553 billion for the base budget,
an increase of $22 billion above the 2010 appropriation. The White House has
touted what it calls "$78 billion" in cuts that Defense Secretary Robert
Gates is considering. But as the Institute for Policy Studies notes: "The
Defense Department talks about cutting its own budget-$78 billion over five
years-and most reporting takes this at face value. It shouldn't. The
Pentagon is following the familiar tradition of planning ambitious
increases, paring them back and calling this a cut."
The $553 billion Pentagon budget doesn't even include war. To Obama's
credit, the costs are actually in the budget. Recall, President George W.
Bush repeatedly called the expenditures "emergency" needs, and pressured
Congress to pass supplemental funding, outside of the normal budget process.
The Obama administration, nevertheless, has given the wars in Iraq,
Afghanistan and Pakistan the Orwellian moniker "Overseas Contingency
Operations," and is asking for $118 billion. Add to that the $55 billion for
the National Intelligence Program (a budget item for which the amount has
never before been revealed, according to government secrecy expert Steven
Aftergood), and the publicly revealed military/intelligence budget is at
close to three-quarters of a trillion dollars.
Obama's 216-page budget doesn't mention "Pentagon" once. He does
invoke the name of President Eisenhower, though. Two times he credits
Eisenhower for creating the national interstate highway system, and, as
mentioned, boasts of the proposed spending freeze: "This freeze would be the
most aggressive effort to restrain discretionary spending to take effect in
30 years and, by 2015, would lower nonsecurity discretionary funding as a
share of the economy to the lowest level since Dwight D. Eisenhower was
president."
If he is going to reference his predecessor, he should learn from
Eisenhower's prescient warning, given in his farewell speech in 1961: "In
the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist."
Another Eisenhower speech that should guide Obama was given in April
1953, before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, just two weeks after
he was inaugurated as president. In it, the general-turned-president said,
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired
signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not
fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
This is one of the coldest winters on record. One in eight people in
the U.S. is on food stamps, the largest percentage of Americans ever. More,
as well, are without health insurance, despite the initial benefits of the
health-care reform act passed last year.
Americans are cold, hungry and unemployed. By increasing military
spending, already greater than all of the world's military budgets combined,
we are only spreading that misery abroad. We should get our priorities
straight.
© 2011 Amy Goodman
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