By Emelie Rutherford
A group of conservative think tanks launched their assault on defense-budget cutters yesterday, unveiling a briefing paper on Capitol Hill just weeks before key political and budgetary decisions are due to be made.
The Defending Defense Project’s event was a coming-out of sorts for the group that made itself known last week in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article by Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, and William Kristol, director of the Foreign Policy Initiative.
“Defending national security interests is the one predominant thing the government can do,” Thomas Donnelly, director of AEI’s Center for Defense Studies, argued yesterday. “It is the only thing the government must do in order for us to keep our freedoms and our prosperity.”
The project’s 11-page brief, “Defending Defense: Setting the Record Straight on U.S. Military Spending Requirements,” argues current levels of defense spending are indeed affordable.
“The defense budget is a relatively small slice of the $14-plus-trillion American pie,” it states. “And it’s a shrinking slice: as a percentage of our economy and as a percentage of the federal budget, the burden of defense is declining. President Obama’s long-term budget projections also reduce Pentagon spending in real dollars.”
It adds: “Moreover, the idea that defense cuts will restore fiscal health simply does not add up: suppose Pentagon spending for 2011–$720 billion–were eliminated entirely. This would only halve this year’s federal deficit of $1.5 trillion. And defense spending is a drop in the ocean of today’s $13.3 trillion of government debt. From the Korean War to the collapse of the Soviet Union, total U.S. defense spending was about $4.7 trillion. So had there been no military spending at all during the Cold War, the savings would not equal even half our current national debt.”
The brief lays out a total of six “myths” and “facts” regarding the defense budget. It refutes the arguments that: more defense spending is not needed because the United States spends more the military than most of the world; Pentagon budgets were exorbitant under former president George W. Bush; Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ push to make the defense budget more efficient will make up for budget shortfalls; current Pentagon spending in unaffordable; the United States should not be the world’s policeman; and military spending should focus on the current wars.
On this last topic, regarding focusing on the wars we’re in, the project argues: “America’s military must be able to fulfill a wide range of disparate missions: defending the homeland; assuring access to the seas, in the air, in space and now in ‘cyberspace;’ preserving the peace in Europe, working to build a peace across the greater Middle East and preparing for the rise of new great powers in the Asia-Pacific.” The briefing paper continues: “The United States has always seen an interest in advancing a global ‘common good’ through disaster relief and other forms of humanitarian assistance. In a dynamic but dangerous globalized world, the presence of U.S. military forces provides an essential stability.”
This stance contrasts the argument House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) has been making in recent months about, as he put in on Wednesday, “America’s excessive military engagement with the rest of the world.”
“Some of our wealthy allies should be able to get along without us,” Frank told reporters after he and 56 other lawmakers requested a presidential deficit-reduction commission scrutinize defense spending as much as non-military spending when it proposes federal budget cuts later this year.
President Barack Obama’s bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform has a Dec. 1 deadline for delivering its recommendations for balancing the nation’s budget, excluding interest payments on debt, by 2015.
Frank and the other 56 lawmakers, all but one of whom are Democrats, note in their letter to the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform that the Pentagon takes up nearly 56 percent of all discretionary federal spending and accounts for almost 65 percent of the increase in annual discretionary spending levels since 2001. While much of that increase is due to direct war costs, they say, almost 37 percent of discretionary spending growth falls under the base defense budget.
They argue a rigorous analysis of the Pentagon budget “will show that substantial spending cuts can be made without threatening our national security, without cutting essential funds for fighting terrorism, and without shirking our obligations as a nation to our brave troops currently in the field, our veterans, and our military retirees.”
Frank created the Sustainable Defense Task Force, a group of national-security experts that in June released a report calling for trimming the Pentagon’s budget by $960 billion over the next decade by cutting weapon systems including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, and MV-22 tilt-rotor Osprey aircraft, and reducing the target number of Navy ships from 313 to 230 (Defense Daily, July 21).
The Republican party potentially could take control of the House, if GOP candidates win enough congressional seats during the Nov. 2 mid-term elections. If they do the anti- defense cutting rhetoric could increase on Capitol Hill, considering some Republicans, including those on the House Armed Services Committee, have called for increased defense spending. The Defending Defense Project is working to counter support for curtailing Pentagon spending among other Republicans.