Confused by the lack of specifics on defense cuts in the big White House deficit-commission report today? You'll find most of them in an earlier version released a few weeks ago. Or you can wait a few days to see the commission recapitulate its plan to cut tanks, planes and more. Even so, defense-budget hawks are holding their breath until they see the fine print.
About three weeks ago, commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson proposed slashing the ginormous federal deficit, in part, by getting rid of $100 billion worth of defense spending. They took a pickaxe to some of the military's most cherished programs. The Marines V-22 Osprey helicopter and "swimming tank" Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle; the Army's Ground Combat Vehicle; half of the Air Force and Navy's F-35 jets -- all would get the axe.
So when the commission released its final report today -- under the dramatic title "The Moment of Truth" -- without any of those so-called "illustrative cuts" identified, it raised Pentagon watchers' eyebrows. But according to the commission, those specifics will be released in the next couple of days.
Those identified "illustrative cuts" will "be primarily the same" as the ones the earlier draft identified, says a commission defense staffer who wasn't authorized to speak for the record. The commission's finalizing the math and cleaning up unspecified errors in Bowles and Simpson's draft. And there might even be another defense program singled out for the chopping block -- but the commissioners are still deciding on that, and the staffer declined to specify what it might be until they do.
One new proposal that the commission does single out that's sure to be controversial in defense circles: capping the cash for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The president should have to "propose annual limits for war spending," it writes. While "budget rules should not determine war policy," from a budgeting perspective, the president should set a "dollar limit" on what the wars cost each year. It suggests using the Congressional Budget Office's projection of having 60,000 troops deployed to both theaters by 2015 as a bean-counting guideline.
Still, defense-budget hawks aren't so keen. For one thing, the commission report shifts terminology from the prior draft, talking about the federal budget in terms of "security" and "non-security" spending, not the more defined category of defense cash. That could leave the door open to including cuts to the international-affairs budget under the name of cutting "security," says Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives -- even though that budget, which funds the State Department and USAID, was about $50 billion last year and the defense budget was nearly $700 billion.
No matter what, Conetta added, under any plan to rein in the "security" budget, the Defense Department "undergoes cuts regardless, there's no question about that. It’s the gorilla in the room." But looking at "the issue at the margin," Conetta said, today's report from the commission leaves unclear "what impact on defense will be" -- and that's under the iffy presumption that there are enough votes in Congress to enact it. Already the incoming chairman of the House Armed Services Committee says he's not going to countenance any defense cuts.
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