Obama Takes a Machete to Military Budget

Another brilliant move by THE ONE.  Cut the defense budget in the middle of three wars.

Via the American Spectator.

Aside from Charlie Sheen or Chuck Hagel, who would want to be the next secretary of defense? The next occupant of the big office in the Pentagon’s E-ring will have the worst job in town because President Obama is doing to the Pentagon what he refuses to do to any other part of the executive branch: he’s taken a machete to its budget.

In February, Obama said that he wanted to take a scalpel, not a machete, to discretionary spending. And in his hyperpartisan budget speech on April 13, he made it clear that was true for every part of the federal government with one exception: the Pentagon. He demanded a new round of budget cuts worthy of the Queen of Hearts: “sentence first, verdict after.”

In the April 13 speech, President Obama claimed that Defense Secretary Bob Gates had already cut $400 billion from the Pentagon’s budget in ten years and said that another $400 billion in cuts should be added in that same period. It was the only real cut in federal spending Obama proposed.

He said, “Over the last two years, Secretary Gates has courageously taken on wasteful spending, saving $400 billion in current and future spending. I believe we can do that again. We need to not only eliminate waste and improve efficiency and effectiveness, but conduct a fundamental review of America’s missions, capabilities, and our role in a changing world. I intend to work with Secretary Gates and the Joint Chiefs on this review, and I will make specific decisions about spending after it’s complete.”

This is Obama’s “Queen of Hearts” theory of defense spending. He sets the amount of funding to be cut and then tells the Pentagon to do a study to justify it.

Begin with the questionable claim that $400 billion in “wasteful” spending (spread over ten years) has already been cut. We don’t know if the $400 billion was wasteful because the cuts were imposed before the Pentagon performed its “Quadrennial Defense Review,” a statutorily-required study which is supposed to measure our military forces against the threats they’re expected to meet and then provide a budget to accomplish the missions. Obama and Gates set the level of cuts and Gates then papered it over with a QDR that justified the predetermined cuts.

Now the president wants to take the machete to the Pentagon budget again. He wants the analysis to find an additional $400 billion to cut from the Pentagon budget in the same ten years and redefine our “role in a changing world.” It’s both necessary and proper to make the analysis the president proposed. But, once again, he’s set the amount to be cut before performing the essential threat analysis.

Since 2008, as George W. Bush’s defense secretary, Gates has derided the idea that we will ever have to fight another conventional war. He regularly condemns “next war-it is,” which he defined as “…the propensity of much of the defense establishment to be in favor of what might be needed in a future conflict.”

Gates, in forcing the abandonment of “next war-itis,” has imposed a change in American military thought and planning that served us well since World War II.

……We will no longer plan for the future and invest in the tools of war we will foreseeably need. The cuts Obama and Gates have already made will result in a force that is shaped differently from the one we might need were an enemy to disagree with Dr. Gates’ belief that we won’t have to fight another conventional war. Or if American satellites were attacked in space. Or if we were to suffer the kind of cyber attacks that were made on Estonia, Kyrgyzstan, and Georgia by Putin’s Russia. Or if any number of other real threats were to be realized.

Instead of allowing Obama and Gates’ successor to go about another round of random cuts, Republicans should do their own, aimed at producing a defense version of Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap” of last year. That study should begin with an analysis of the threats that must be met, derive from them the capabilities we need to meet the threats, and from those capabilities define the budget to ensure the Defense Department has the people and the assets to do the job.

Every Pentagon study I’ve seen or been involved with begins with a document called the “terms of reference” which defines the job to be done. Because Obama has announced the result he wants, his study will have terms of reference that are set to justify the cuts.
http://spectator.org/archives/2011/04/25/obamas-machete-hacks-up-pentag/print

They usually wait until after a war before they slice, dice, and drawdown military capabilities.
Obama’s hatchet job isn’t surprising.  After all, “winning isn’t necessarily the goal”. Neither is being concerned about China’s aggression,cyber attacks, and military buildup.
 
B. Hussein should take a swing at crap like THIS, and THIS, and THIS, and
THIS.
Billions of dollars in wasteful pork, the stimulus scam, bailouts, ObamaCare, and union payoffs; much of which involves his socialist pet projects.

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