Offering a military budget designed to head off charges that he’s weak on defense, President Obama on Thursday unveiled a Pentagon spending plan that fails to cut any major procurement programs and calls for spending $36 billion more on the military in 2017 than it will spend this year.
Though billed as a cumulative cut of $259 billion over the next five years, that reduction is based on previous budget proposals that presumed the military spending would continue to grow as fast as it has over the past decade, when spending more than doubled. Total military spending, including $115 billion for the war in Afghanistan and recently-ended conflict in Iraq, totaled $646 billion this year, up from $310 billion in 2001.
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who unveiled the broad outlines of the budget plan at a Pentagon press conference, repeated a theme that administration officials have sounded since last August’s debt ceiling deal, which imposed minor cuts in military spending. The deal poses the threat that there will be a significant 10-year reduction of $500 billion in military spending through sequestration if Congress doesn’t come up with alternatives.
“Sequestration would be a doubling of the cuts,” Panetta said. “That would require they take place through a meat axe approach that would hollow out the force and do severe damage to our national defense for generations.”
Liberal critics immediately scoffed at such assertions and blasted the limited cuts in Obama’s post-Iraq spending plan, which they point out would be the smallest post-war build-down of modern times. Read more »



