UPDATE:
For a more in-depth discussion on how “Struggling with debt, Congress talks defense cuts,” please click here.
Starting with the words, “Taking a stance once unthinkable in a time of two wars, Democrats and Republicans alike are insisting that the billions spent on the military can be significantly cut back over the next decade as the nation struggles to reduce its spiraling debt,” the AP article gives the reader a good insight into the various plans, proposals, ideas and sometimes just wishful thinking being bandied about in the halls and offices of Congress and elsewhere.
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Original Post:
A recent post on a sweeping proposal by the Defense Business Board to drastically overhaul the military retirement system generated some discussion not only on the military retirement system (One reader claiming “the retirement system is killing the budget”)*, but on the DoD budget in general (the same reader: “Right-sizing the military is long overdue, as is, for example… procurement reform.”)
As our legislators wrangle, quibble and continue to act as a dysfunctional family on critical budget and fiscal issues and as “plans” to remediate our fiscal ills are being bandied about, what do these plans say about defense spending?
The reputable Defense News says, in effect, not much: “The two current debt-ceiling plans put forward by the U.S. House and Senate leaderships provide very few specifics on how defense spending would be cut.”
On the plan put forward by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.:
Of the plan’s $2.7 trillion in claimed savings, $1 trillion comes from drawing down operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The plan substitutes the Congressional Budget Office’s much higher placeholder for war spending over the next decade and replaces it with the Obama administration’s lower $50 billion projection. The difference between these two estimates is more than $1 trillion.
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Excluding these savings, it is unclear how much of the remaining $1.7 trillion would come from the Pentagon.
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If you assume that veterans’ spending is not going to be included in the cuts, the Reid plan cuts at most $81 billion from the Pentagon’s budget for [2012 and 2013those two years, Harrison [ an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments] said.
Beyond 2013, it’s anybody’s guess what would happen to defense under Reid’s plan, as it only provides a broad discretionary spending cap for each year, with no breakout for security or non-security spending.
How about Boehner’s “plan?”:
Meanwhile, House Speaker John Boehner’s plan provides even fewer details about how the spending caps would be divided between security and non-security.
According to Byron Callan, a senior defense analyst with Capital Alpha Partners, $741 billion of the $917 billion in savings under the Boehner plan results from discretionary spending cuts.
The net discretionary spending caps for 2012 and 2013 are $25 billion and $46 billion, respectively. Boehner’s plan, like Reid’s, excludes funding for overseas contingency operations in its discretionary spending category.
For more “sketchy”—i.e. confusing—details” please click here
* Clarification:
The complete statement by the reader was:
No, the retirement system is killing the defense budget, according to DOD members in the past. Be clear (and correct). Gates has expressed concern about — no surprise — pension and health care costs, as have others at the DOD
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.