[PAA-Discuss] FW: cutting Pentagon Budget

[Lee Loe]

Good info. Lee/Mom/Cuz
 
(Connie, if you don't want this kind of email dooooo let me know! Hugs, Lee)

  _____  

From: Lee Loe [mailto:leeloe at igc.org] 
Sent: Tuesday, August 02, 2011 11:23 PM
To: 'Lee Loe'
Subject: cutting Pentagon Budget


II) Summary:
U.S./Top News <outbind://32/#August2t1>   William Hartung, Huffington Post
1) The good news is that the Pentagon budget is finally on the table in
deficit reduction talks, writes William Hartung in the Huffington Post. But
it will take a lot more work to ensure that it is truly reduced. The
reductions being proposed now are being measured against the Pentagon's
hoped-for rate of growth, not against current spending levels. So numbers
that may sound like big cuts may not actually be cuts at all - they could
just be reductions in the rate of growth. 

In the first round, the deficit reduction package calls for $350 billion in
reductions in "defense spending" over the next decade, which would still
allow the Pentagon budget to grow faster than inflation, Hartung writes. But
then there is another round of cuts, to be determined by a congressional
commission charged with coming up with an additional $1.5 trillion in
deficit reduction over the next decade. 

The challenge will be to transform this opportunity into real cuts along the
lines suggested by the Sustainable Defense Task Force, the Domenici-Rivlin
task force, the report of the president's deficit commission, the Cato
Institute, the Stimson Center, the Center for American Progress and other
independent analysts. These proposals call for reductions in Pentagon
spending ranging from $400 billion over five years to $1.4 trillion over ten
years. [Thus, essentially the entire deficit reduction could be achieved
with military cuts - JFP.]

2) The first fiscal year of the debt deal reduces "security" spending $4.5
billion below the FY 2011 level, writes Laicie Olson for the Center for Arms
Control and Non-Proliferation. While this is a small cut, it would represent
the first time in recent years that "security" spending has actually gone
down, rather than merely being reduced from previously projected increases. 

3) What McKeon and other defense hawks are really worried about is the
trigger mechanism, which would automatically cut $600 billion from the base
defense budgets over 10 years if the new joint committee can't make a deal
on $1.2 trillion of additional cuts, writes Josh Rogin in Foreign Policy.
After "mechanical adjustments," which are ways to predict the real value of
the cuts considering other factors, that $600 billion cut is estimated by
the administration to actually be about $534 billion.

If you add the $350 billion in defense cuts announced by the White House as
part of today's deal with the $534 billion in defense cuts in the trigger
mechanism, it totals $884 billion. That number is close to the $886 billion
in defense cuts proposed in the plan put forth by the Senate's bipartisan
budget group the Gang of Six, which President Obama has already endorsed,
Rogin notes.

4) As a result of the trigger mechanism, Republican defense hawks may face a
choice between tax increases and cutting military spending, the New York
Times reports. Tea Party-allied Republicans might not mind, the Times notes,
since many would like to see a smaller government across the board and a
less expensive US presence around the world.

5) The prospect of $600 billion in additional defense cuts over the next
decade is enough to compel the U.S. military to make big changes to its
global strategy, the Washington Post reports. "You could reasonably make
those cuts as long as you were willing to rethink our military strategy, not
allow for any sacred cows and cut ruthlessly," said Todd Harrison, a senior
fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an influential
defense think tank with close ties to the Pentagon.

To find $1 trillion in savings, the White House would have to make major
changes to its current global military strategy, under which the Pentagon
should be able to fight two wars like Iraq and Afghanistan simultaneously,
the Post notes. Scaling back that requirement would allow for big cuts to
the Army and Marine Corps, which collectively have grown by about 92,000 men
and women since 2001 and would probably have to shrink at a minimum to
pre-2001 levels. In shrinking the force, Congress would be betting that the
Afghan war will wind down as planned and that the country will not be drawn
into any big, costly counterinsurgency wars in the next 10 to 15 years.

6) Spending more than $200 billion over the next ten years to rebuild the
U.S. nuclear arsenal can no longer be justified in the post-budget-deal era,
writes Tom Collina of the Arms Control Association in The Hill. The
Department of Defense and the National Nuclear Security Administration plan
to use this $200 billion to build a new generation of submarines, bombers
and missiles for the nuclear "triad," upgrade the nuclear warheads they
carry, and rebuild the warhead factories. One of the Senate's most
conservative Republicans, Tom Coburn, recently called for cutting $79
billion from the U.S. nuclear weapons budget over the next decade, Collina
notes.


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