The budget compromise reached by the White House and Congress this weekend included a “historic amount of cuts,” as House Speaker John Boehner and Senate majority leader Harry Reid said in their joint statement announcing the deal. “The largest annual spending cut in our history,” boasted President Obama. Media coverage of the deal hailed the “sweeping” and “across-the-board” nature of the cuts. The Republican leadership has “shifted the focus in Washington away from spending and toward austerity” and slashed government “more steeply than expected,” wrote Paul West in the Los Angeles Times.
And yet there is one, massive piece of the federal budget that these brave hawks dared not touch: defense. Not a solitary penny of the $38 billion in spending cuts will come out of the Pentagon’s coffers. In fact, defense spending will increase by $5 billion over 2010 levels, to $513 billion. And that doesn’t even include the cost of ongoing “overseas contingency operations,” otherwise known as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
All told, U.S. military spending in 2011 will exceed $700 billion — the most since World War II. That amounts to more than half of all government discretionary spending. It represents 35% of total military spending on the planet. And yet it’s doubtful that the idea of substantially reducing the defense budget was raised by either side during last week’s negotiations. Instead, the White House celebrated the meager accomplishment of not increasing the Pentagon budget quite as much as the Republicans had proposed — though, rest assured, it will still increase. “We won the argument,” one Democratic spinner crowed in an e-mail to the Washington Post.
God help us if they start to lose. For all the posturing in Washington about confronting the “existential threat” posed by the country’s dire fiscal state, there has been, until now, almost no serious discussion about reducing America’s vast military expenditures. The White House says Obama’s speech on the deficit this week will call for Pentagon cuts. But as TIME’s Mark Thompson has shown, neither Obama’s 2012 budget proposal nor Representative Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” contemplate a major decrease in overall military spending anytime in the near future. At best, Ryan’s proposal would slow the rate of growth of the defense budget over the next 10 years but won’t halt it. Even after pocketing the expected savings from a pullback of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Ryan’s budget projection calls for nearly $8 trillion in military spending over the next decade — more than the government’s Medicare obligations, which Ryan asserts must be reformed. The justification for continued runaway defense spending? “The U.S. cannot retreat in its aggressive campaign against the global network of terrorists intent on taking American lives and destroying the American way of life.”
