Cut defense spending

“Commission takes aim at defense budget

Proposal calls for slashing $100 billion in DOD programs and technologies

·        By Amber Corrin

·        Nov 19, 2010

Federal authorities are ratcheting up demands to cut spending, including Defense Department budgeting that had not been touched by previous mandates to cut spending.

On Nov. 10, co-chairs of the White House-established National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform released an expansive draft proposalfor trimming the federal budget, including significant cuts into the DOD budget that would total $100 billion by 2015.

The proposal was echoed Nov. 18 in a letter signed by a second, bipartisan panel of 45 defense and budget experts sponsored by the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy and the Project on Defense Alternatives. The panel urged the fiscal commission to move forward with defense cuts

The fiscal commission’s $100 billion-trimming budget recommendations come in addition to the ongoing DOD budget cuts proposed earlier this year by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, which are designed to yield $100 billion in savings to be funneled into war spending.

But commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles, a former Clinton administration official, and former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson said those savings should instead be directed toward reducing outstanding debt.

“Currently, the savings are to be reallocated to force structure and modernization. If these savings were applied to deficit reduction instead, we could save $28 billion in 2015,” they wrote in the proposal’s illustration of savings.

Gates, speaking Nov. 16 at a Wall Street Journal event in Washington,criticized fiscal commission’s recommendations as amounting to “math, not strategy," and rejected the idea that DOD is the main problem with the federal deficit.

The bipartisan panel backed the recommendations of Bowles and Simpson, noting that the burgeoning federal deficit is a threat to national security and that DOD shouldn’t be exempt from measures to reduce the national debt.

“The military, like other parts of the government, needs to cut spending. It’s not viable economically or politically to exempt defense from spending initiatives,” said Gordon Adams, an American University professor and former associate director at Office for Management of Budget who was one of the 45 proponents that signed off on the letter to Bowles and Simpson. Adams, along with four other of the signatories, spoke with reporters in a conference call Nov. 18.”