Current State of Play

 
The base defense budget in FY09 was $513 billion and current news stories indicate that the Obama administration's FY10 defense budget will be at $534 billion. This would represent about a $21 billion increase in the defense budget and is about $7 billion higher than the outgoing defense budget projections offered by the Bush administration. The Bush Administration, however, has taken increasing amounts of defense spending off-budget in recent years through the use of supplemental appropriations.  The Obama administration pledged to reverse this practice and has moved items that were in the supplemental into the base budget, which accounts for much of the increase in the base defense budget.  The Obama administration's supplemental request for $75.5 billion will bring FY09 war-time supplemental spending to about $142 billion, which is significantly lower than the FY08 supplemental spending, which amounted to more than $180 billion. Additionally, the Obama administration indicated that the 2010 war-related supplemental requests will be about $130 billion, which would be $11.5 billion less than the 2009 level.

Cumulatively - when supplemental spending is combined with the base defense budget - the United States in 2009 will spend about $11 billion less on defense than it did in 2008 and will spend about $3 billion less in 2010 on defense than it did in 2008.
 

Message Points:

 
The Obama administration's budget represents a return to responsible budgeting. The signal that the Administration plans to move away from supplemental requests and its willingness to cut items unrelated to war spending represents a return to responsible budgeting.   

The Obama administration has sent a signal that the Pentagon will have to start making hard choices. The administration did not yield to the Pentagon's request for a massive increase in spending and has forced some hard choices on the Pentagon.

This defense budget does not predetermine the new administration's approach to the defense spending. Significant reform of the defense budget was not expected with this initial budget, considering that many Obama administration officials are still not in place and that the administration has been in office little more than a month. This budget however sends some important signals and leaves open the prospect for budget reform going forward.  

We must match resources to priorities, and show the strength and judgment to cut wasteful and unnecessary weapons programs. Choosing where to invest our nation's defense resources requires having a strategy and allocating resources to match. This requires hard choices among weapons programs. The Bush Administration failed to make the hard choices, cancelling only two weapons programs during its tenure. The national missile defense system, for example, has cost the U.S. billions of dollars as well as creating diplomatic problems, with almost no demonstrated successes. While theater missile defense is important and should be continued, national missile defense should remain, for now, in research and development. There is also a need to make war funding more transparent and to reduce the reliance on supplemental spending.  [NSN Military Policy Report 2008. NSN Daily Update, 2/3/09]

Conservatives' Take:

Conservatives have argued that the Obama administration's budget request represents a cut in defense spending. Governor Jindal said in his response to Obama's address to Congress, "Now is no time to dismantle the defenses that have protected this country for hundreds of years, or make deep cuts in funding for our troops." They point to the Pentagon's request for $584 billion dollars and say that a budget that does not meet that number is a cut, regardless of its relationship to the FY09 level.

•  NSN's Take: "Two weeks into the Obama Administration, instead of a serious policy debate over defense spending and priorities, conservatives have taken an Obama budget request for an 8 percent increase, in line with Bush Administration recommendations, and turned it into a "cut." Fox News and Robert Kagan call an OMB-ordered decrease in the Pentagon's initial wish list amounts to a "10 percent cut in defense spending." Yet CQ reports that the administration plans to increase the 2010 defense budget to $527 billion from $512 billion -an eight percent increase in line with the recommendations of the Bush administration for FY2010 defense spending. Only in the nonsensical world of conservative commentators could a $40 billion increase over the previous year represent a 10 percent cut. But what is perhaps more troubling then conservatives' manipulation of numbers to score political points is the complete lack of vision demonstrated in their advocacy for more defense spending. Having been tremendous advocates of the bankrupt Rumsfeld vision of "transformation" through high-dollar, high-tech defense acquisitions, neo-conservatives are now calling for more spending for the sake of more spending without putting forth any clear conservative vision for what this spending is supposed to achieve - except, perhaps, to portray progressives as weak on defense.  [NSN Daily Update, 2/3/09]

 

Government Documents:

•    White House, Department of Defense FY10 budget. [FY10 budget (pdf)]

•    Congressional Research Service, "The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11," [CRS, 10/15/08 (pdf)]

 

Opinion pieces:

•    Gordon Adams, "Hold the Line on Defense Spending," [Huffington Post, 2/12/09]

•    Bernard Finkel "Don't Believe Spending Cut Rumors," [Defense News, 11/17/08]

•    Larry Korb, "Defense Spending as Stimulus," [Baltimore Sun, 2/8/09]

•    Spencer Ackerman "Everyone Rebrand Defense Spending as Stimulus," [Washington Independent, 1/27/09]

 

Reports:

•    Foreign Policy in Focus, Unified National Security Budget Task Force report calls for the creation of a single national security budget that enables tradeoffs across agencies. Report also breaks down the defense budget.  

•    Center for American Progress, "Building a Military for the 21st Century" - provides break down of the defense budget and recommendations for cuts.

•    Brookings Institution, "Resources for Hard Power," by Michael O'Hanlon, provides defense budget analysis and background and recommendations for cuts and increases.