http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/08/02/defense-cuts-in-debt-limit-deal-less-than-meets-the-eye/snip
So instead of $350 billion cutting the Pentagon in the first round, you have $350 billion cutting “security.” And remember, the President’s budget already planned for $400 billion in cuts to the Pentagon budget over the next ten years. So defense did at least $50 billion better than expectations.
“This is a good deal for defense when you probe under the numbers,” said Lawrence Korb, a defense expert at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning research center. “It’s better than what the Defense Department was expecting.” <...>
Korb, who studies defense budgets, said Congress could cut the defense baseline budget by $100 billion annually over the next decade and still spend more than it did during the height of the Cold War, adjusted for inflation. He noted that the baseline defense budget has climbed every year for 13 years, a record increase.
As William Hartung writes, the first-stage proposal would cut Pentagon budgets by less than 1%. Not to mention the fact that these kinds of cuts could be shifted to personnel in the form of health care and pensions for active duty military, not the weapons of war. O-ho, but you say, the trigger of automatic cuts is very heavy on the Pentagon – up to $600 billion, to be exact. And unlike the “security” dodge, those cuts fall directly on DoD and any defense-related programs at agencies like the Department of Energy. But of course, that is a trigger that may not ever fire.
There’s plenty of reason to believe that the parties will not be able to come together in a SuperCongress joint committee to arrive at recommendations for deficit reduction that would stave off the trigger. There’s reason to believe that Republicans would prefer the trigger to tax hikes, and that Democrats would prefer the trigger to cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. There’s reason to believe that joint committees like this don’t really work very well, historically.
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http://my.firedoglake.com/codepink/2011/08/02/enormous-cuts-in-military-spending-read-the-fine-print/Enormous Cuts in Military Spending? Read the Fine Print
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First, the cuts for 2012 are virtually nil. Security spending—which includes the Pentagon, State Department, Homeland Security, part of Veterans Affairs and intelligence spending—will be capped at $684 billion in 2012, a decline of merely $5 billion (less than 1 percent) from this year.
Yes, there are potentially far more drastic cuts down the road. In addition to the first $1 trillion in cuts over the next decade, a bipartisan Congressional committee must come up with an additional $1.5 trillion cuts by November — or trigger an automatic across-the-board reduction of $1.2 trillion starting in 2013, half of which would be expected to come from military spending.
However, expect this threat of deep military cuts – if cutting defense by 3 percent a year can be called “deep” when it has grown at a rate of 9 percent over the last decade – to be used as a bargaining chip by Democrats to extract concessions on tax increases from Republicans; don’t hold your breath expecting them to actually materialize. And with House Republicans already pledging to “fight on behalf of our Armed Forces,” by which they mean the military-industrial complex, don’t expect Democrats to put up much of a fight. Even were Obama so inclined, the idea that he will expend political capital on cutting military spending even as he expands the war on terror in Libya, Yemen and Somalia is doubtful, especially with an election looming.
But let’s put aside cynicism and accept the Obama administration at its word. Let’s assume the White House and Congress agree to cut military spending by $350 billion a year over 10 years. While the numbers may sound impressive out of context, that’s like draining an Olympic-sized pool with a glass from your kitchen: you’re going to be at it for awhile. The military budget has ballooned so much over the last decade that even if it was cut in half tomorrow the U.S. would still spend more than it did in 2001.
Indeed, the Obama administration’s proposed military budget for 2012 – the baseline from which future cuts are projected – is at its “highest level since World War II,” according to the non-partisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, “surpassing the Cold War peak” set by Ronald Reagan and a Democratic House of Representatives in 1985. Even if, instead of over a decade, the whole, entirely-subject-to-change $350 billion was cut from the defense budget in one fiscal year alone, the U.S. would still lead the globe in military spending, devoting twice as much to guns and bombs as its closest and much more populous rival, China. And that’s without factoring in the cost of any new wars.
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