A couple of months ago, President Obama announced 'deep cuts' in US military spending, sending signals to hopeful liberals and pessimistic conservatives alike. But, as is so frequently the case with Barack Obama's announcements, rhetorical flourishes need unpacking, and who better to open up this matter than someone who's job it is to read the fine print and tell us what the 'deep cuts' announcement actually means.
Not very much, as it turns out. Despite being the 'soft power' president, offering the hand of friendship rather than a clenched fist to the world, Brack Obama continues to pursue policies that fit right in with his Republican predecessor. 50 years and a few short months after President Eisenhower's warnings about the corrosive effects of a 'military-industrial complex', President Obama continues to fund, empower and encourage the most aggressive and militaristic elements of American society, economy and polity.
The author of the article reprinted below from a blog at Forbes magazine is:
Loren Thompson is Chief Operating Officer of the non-profit Lexington Institute and Chief Executive Officer of the private consultancy Source Associates. The Lexington Institute receives money from many of the nation’s leading defense contractors, and Source Associates provides technical services to companies in the industry.
http://blogs.forbes.com/beltway/2011/04/19/obamas-deep-defense-cuts-wont-amount-to-much/
ACCESSED 29 JUNE 2011
Obama’s “Deep” Defense Cuts Won’t Amount To Much
Apr. 19 2011 - 9:16 am | 4,059 views
Posted by Loren Thompson
On April 13, President Obama finally got around to saying what he would do about the federal government’s huge budget deficit. Not surprisingly, one of the items in his proposed deficit-reduction package was cuts in spending on national security — $400 billion over 12 years, to be precise. Well, maybe precise is the wrong term to use here.
The White House hasn’t clarified whether it’s counting inflation, where the cuts would fall, or when. In fact, it hasn’t really said much at all beyond the big top-line number. Nonetheless, the lead in the next day’s Washington Post story described “deep cuts in military and domestic spending,” and Politico warned of “far-reaching implications” that might entail “a dramatic reduction in the U.S. military’s global footprint, size and capabilities.”
These characterizations seem a bit exaggerated. Mr. Obama’s new and improved plan for slimming down America’s national-security posture likely will entail little sacrifice for the federal government’s biggest source of discretionary spending, the Department of Defense. It’s not that there isn’t plenty of wasteful spending to be found — the Army will spend over $2 billion during the period in question just on its music bands — but the way the President has couched his proposed savings minimizes their likely impact on security (and the deficit). Let’s take a look at some of the factors mitigating what seems like a very big cut in spending.
The first and most obvious point to note is that Mr. Obama won’t even be in office during most of the period when his reductions are supposed to be realized. The factsheet distributed by the White House press office predicts the president’s security cuts would “save $400 billion by 2023,” but even if he is re-elected to a second four-year term in 2012, that would still require his successor to follow through on implementing the savings for the last seven years of a twelve-year period. Nobody today can say whether that successor will be a Democrat or a Republican, what new security challenges might arise, or how the government’s fiscal circumstances could change. What can be said for sure is that new presidents seldom feel bound by the priorities of their predecessors, and thus the Obama efficiencies are likely to be forgotten long before 2023 rolls around.
A second factor that has gotten short shrift in initial coverage of the president’s proposals is the sheer scale of planned defense spending during the period in question. The government hasn’t yet released spending plans for the last two years of the period covered by the President’s pronouncements, but it has disclosed planned defense spending of over $6 trillion during the ten years ending in 2021. Robert Ewers of Height Analytics estimated in an April 14 note that the last two years of the covered period — assuming two percent inflation annually — would raise the 12-year total to $7.5 trillion in military outlays. So if the president is expressing his aggregate security savings in then-year rather than constant dollars, which is almost certainly the case, then the $400 billion only amounts to 5.3 percent of Pentagon spending during the period. Saving one out of every twenty dollars spent from a defense budget that has seen buying power balloon by 75 percent over the past ten years doesn’t sound like a herculean task.
But the task isn’t even that hard, because a third mitigating factor in the president’s proposed cuts is that they would be derived from the government’s entire security community, not just the Department of Defense. That broader security community currently includes an annual budget of $53 billion for the Department of State and international programs, $57 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs, $43 billion for the Department of Homeland Security and $11 billion for Department of Energy nuclear weapons programs. Each of these departments expects annual budget increases during the period in question, and there are additional intelligence outlays not reported in public documents that are funded outside the Pentagon budget. Add those to the defense budget for the period 2012-2023, and total security outlays approach a staggering $10 trillion. Thus, the $400 billion in savings that President Obama is seeking represents only about four percent of the amount the government currently proposes to spend on all security functions during his target period.
Finding an average of $33 billion in annual savings in America’s current, overgrown security apparatus is not likely to entail heavy political lifting for this president or whoever follows him. In fact, Mr. Obama’s aides were able to identify two trillion dollars in prospective savings across the entire federal government over a ten-year period during his first month in office, half of which were supposed to come just from getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan. But those savings didn’t materialize the way the administration planned due to congressional resistance, and that brings us to one other point about the Obama defense cuts: none of them will happen unless Congress goes along, which it probably won’t. Despite all the speculation about Tea Party deficit hawks making common cause with liberals on the other side of the aisle to cut Pentagon spending, there just isn’t much evidence Republicans are ready to slash military outlays. Party leaders like Representatives John Boehner and Paul Ryan have explicitly said they will not countenance big cuts in the military budget, regardless of what other tradeoffs have to be made.
So the bottom line on President Obama’s “deep cuts” in security spending is that many of them probably won’t happen, but even if they did the damage to America’s military posture and global presence is likely to be modest. The White House has already directed that any new cuts to defense spending be preceded by a comprehensive review of capabilities and missions, meaning that whatever budget cuts occur will be allocated to avoid harming essential functions. What’s remarkable about the proposed reductions isn’t their size, but the stubbornness with which the Obama Administration continues to resist turning the Pentagon into a bill-payer for other priorities. This isn’t the way Democratic administrations are supposed to behave when wars are ending, and it suggests much of the rhetoric about a coming defense downturn has been overdone. Preserving a strong security posture may be one area where bipartisanship still has a future.
Loren Thompson is Chief Operating Officer of the non-profit Lexington Institute and Chief Executive Officer of the private consultancy Source Associates. The Lexington Institute receives money from many of the nation’s leading defense contractors, and Source Associates provides technical services to companies in the industry.
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