Bush Passes Buck on Defense to Obama, McCain, etc.

President Obama, McCain, Clinton, or Romney: You're screwed. The new, half-trillion dollar defense budget -- the highest ever -- pares a couple of big projects back, like the Navy's troubled Littoral Combat Ship program. But the new defense budget doesn't axe a single major weapons system. Which means it "pushes some tough decisions on a handful of costly programs to the White House's next occupant," the Wall Street Journal notes.

*Big weapons systems oriented toward conventional conflicts have strong and vocal backers in Congress and the Pentagon. That makes decisions on cutting such spending very difficult. The Pentagon had been preparing to take the first steps to shut down Lockheed Martin Corp.'s and Boeing Co.'s F-22 Raptor fighter production lines, but no money is set aside to shut down manufacturing in fiscal 2009 -- a move that effectively delays the decision on whether to buy more planes... [In fact, the budget calls for 20 F-22s to be built -- ed.]
*

Similarly, no funding was provided to shut down production of Boeing's C-17 transport plane, a move that delays a decision on what to do with the line...

For the F-35 Joint Strike
Fighter, funding climbed slightly to $6.73 billion. For the third year, the White House proposed eliminating funding for an engine developed by
General Electric Co. for the plane, a move widely expected to again be reversed by Congress.

The Navy's Littoral Combat Ship, a near-shore vessel that could account for as many as 55 of the Navy's
313-ship long-term goal, is being pressured because of cost increases.
The Navy, which had originally said it wanted six ships next fiscal year, now is scheduled to get two, a sign that rising costs are taking a toll on the program.

*The Army's Future Combat Systems contract, a battlefield technology project overseen by Boeing and SAIC
Inc., will get $3.56 billion. * [It's highest figure ever, I believe -- ed.]

More than $21 billion is being set aside for space and missile-defense initiatives, areas in which
Lockheed, Northrop and Boeing have strong roles, but work is spread throughout the industry.

The defense companies generally said the budget leaves them well-positioned.

In other words, the big weapons we've got now aren't all that much different from the ones we had before 9/11. Does that sound like the right approach to you?

P.S.: One other interesting tidbit from the WSJ story is that "more than half of the Air Force's 93 aircraft being sought in the budget would be pilotless planes such as General Atomics
Aeronautical Systems Inc.'s Predator or Northrop Grumman Corp.'s Global
Hawk."