Earlier today, staffers on the House Budget Committee -Paul Ryan's shop- unveiled their plan to trim the federal budget. The big question was whether the defense budget, already the subject of self-inflicted cuts by the Obama administration, would take another hit.
Ryan staffers are saying the right thing:
Republican leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives will seek $32 billion in spending cuts from current levels this year as part of an effort to reduce a forecasted $1.5 trillion deficit... The spending cuts would fall mainly on domestic programs other than domestic security protections and benefits for war veterans, according to the aides, who asked not to be identified.
But, National Journal is reporting that defense is actually set to take a surprise hit, to the tune of $16 billion dollars.
House Republicans are proposing to slash $74 billion in discretionary spending this year, and have included a surprise cut of $16 billion for defense and other security programs. Because House appropriators have the authority to set specific limits for all categories of discretionary spending, they could choose to ignore Ryan's call to allocate some of the cuts to security programs. Alternatively, the security cuts could simply hit programs that Defense Secretary Roberts Gates has already targeted for cancellation, such as the Marine Corps' Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle produced by General Dynamics and the Army's surface-launched advanced medium-range air-to-air missile developed by Raytheon. The cuts would not affect combat operations in Afghanistan or Iraq, but it isn't clear what other parts of defense or homeland security spending lawmakers do want to cut.
This could be another Congressional shell game, with certain members simply rolling the Obama defense cuts into the overall budget. But Ryan has had this right from the beginning, identifying ballooning entitlements as the source of the deficit, not national security funding. House Republicans should ask themselves if they really want to break from Paul Ryan to rubber stamp an Obama plan to drain the Pentagon's coffers
Cutting defense while two wars are raging is a supremely bad idea in its own right. Calculate in an increasingly hostile China -who unveils a new weapon monthly, it seems- with the growing age of our inventory, and you start to flirt with catastrophic. Providing for the common defense is constitutionally mandated. The defense budget will not be going away. Careful investment in modernization systems now, instead of kicking the can down the road, helps keep the price tag manageable. We've already cut close to two generations worth of weapon systems. Wait another generation, and modernization costs could become insurmountable.