Don't Bet on Obama Reining in Defense Spending

[Charles_Main]

by Benjamin H. Friedman

Benjamin H. Friedman is research fellow in defense and homeland security studies at the Cato Institute and a PhD candidate in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Added to cato.org on February 18, 2009

This article appeared in the World Politics Review on February 18, 2009

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9987

Many Americans believe that Barack Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress will lower defense spending and restrain the militaristic foreign policy it underwrites. The coming years should destroy that myth. America's overly aggressive and fiscally reckless defense policy will survive the Democratic majority.

The Obama administration inherits runaway defense spending and leadership of a military that wants more. Non-war or base defense spending will be more than $515 billion in fiscal year 2009. Adjusting for inflation, that's 40 percent higher than the defense budget when George W. Bush took office. Add the wars, nuclear weapons research, veterans, and homeland security, and you get about $750 billion. That is more than six times what China spends, 10 times what Russia spends and 70 times what Iran, North Korea and Syria spend combined.

and

The Pentagon's draft fiscal year 2010 budget, drawn up last year under Gates, set a base of $584 billion -- or $70 billion above FY 2009. Pentagon observers called the request an attempted fait accompli. If Obama held spending level, rejecting the increase, hawks could blast him for "cutting" defense.

To its credit, the Obama administration refused to be bulldozed. With the bailout and stimulus sucking up dollars, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) recently told the Pentagon to try again, setting the base at $527 billion, a slight increase above fiscal year 2009. Neoconservatives predictably called this a cut and a boon to our enemies.

The administration's appetite for conflict with the Pentagon appears limited, however. According to InsideDefense.com, Gates is still pushing for a base budget of $540 billion, although that might include costs previously covered by supplemental war requests, which have increasingly funded programs barely related to the wars. Moreover, OMB is reportedly planning increases in the Pentagon's out-year spending. The Bush administration's future defense plan saw spending leveling off starting in FY 2009. Obama apparently plans to restore spending growth. Recession and competing demands should limit the increases, but large cuts are unlikely.

That shouldn't surprise us. Obama's vision of American security requirements is nearly as grandiose as his predecessor's. He sees security as indivisible, defining all instability as a danger to Americans that requires our management. He wants to preserve and expand our Cold War alliances, which long ago ceased to serve our security. He embraces Washington's hubristic notion that our national security bureaucracy can "fix" failed states. Bush chose to fight "terror" by targeting "evil." Obama plans to do so by attacking "hopelessness."

They call a slight increase a cut simply because it is less than the pentagon asked for.

Talk about slight of hand and word games.

 

[DiveCon]

thats typical though