- Sep 2, 2008
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CQ Politics | Senate Armed Services Panel Resists Defense Cuts
Fiscal responsibility at it's finest! Thoughts USMB?
Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee are resisting the idea that defense spending cuts should be part of an effort to curb the budget deficit.
During a Tuesday hearing, a bipartisan chorus of the panel’s more conservative members applauded a blue-ribbon defense review group’s conclusion that Pentagon spending should increase, not decline, in the years ahead.
That recommendation came from the Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel, which Congress created last year to provide a bipartisan assessment of the Pentagon’s 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, a congressionally mandated study of defense plans and resources.
The panel’s chairmen — William J. Perry, a Defense secretary under President Bill Clinton, and Stephen J. Hadley , a national security adviser to President George W. Bush — presented their findings at Tuesday’s hearing, six days after a similar presentation to the House Armed Services Committee.
The fiscal 2011 Defense budget request of about $549 billion is, even after adjusting for inflation, the largest since World War II — and that’s not even counting the additional $158.1 billion request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the coming fiscal year. But Perry and Hadley warned that this sum and the projected growth — which barely exceeds the rate of inflation — is insufficient to pay for everything the country has asked the Pentagon to do.
Fiscal responsibility at it's finest! Thoughts USMB?