Top lawmakers warn against defense cuts

[unhappycamper]

Top lawmakers warn against defense cuts
By Rick Maze - Staff writer
Posted : Thursday Mar 12, 2009 13:55:16 EDT

The senior Republican on the House Armed Services Committee says the U.S. military will feel the pain of the global economic crisis beginning in 2011.

The 2010 defense budget proposed by the Obama administration will mask the effects of economic problems by moving the costs of war from a supplemental budget into the regular defense budget, said Rep. John McHugh of New York.

“The story is bleaker in future years, when the real costs of our baseline defense requirements will no longer by masked by supplemental appropriations,” McHugh said Wednesday during a hearing about the effect of the global financial crisis on national security.

McHugh said the problem is that the wartime supplemental budget has contained funding for some expensive things, like the $6.8 billion cost of increasing the size of the Army and Marine Corps, which will now fall on the base budget at a time when increases much beyond the rate of inflation are not expected.

“I am concerned what impact flat-lining defense spending will have on national security policy in the midst of global financial insecurity,” McHugh said.


Rest of article at: http://armytimes.com/news/2009/03/military_economiccrisis_defense_031109w/%2e