WASHINGTON
Civilian- and military-budget planners say that they are already analyzing worst-case contingency-spending plans that would freeze or slash their overall budgets.
The obvious targets for savings would be of great price of recent origin arms programs, which have racked up cost overruns of at smallest $300 billion on the side of the crop 75 weapons systems, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
Congressional budget experts say likely targets for reductions are the Army’s plans for fielding advanced combat systems, the Air Force’s Joint Strike Fighter, the Navy’s new destroyer and the ground-based missile-defense system.
Even before the crisis on Wall Street, senior Pentagon officials were anticipating little appetite for advance in military expenditure after seven years of war.
But the interrogation of by means of what means to pay for national safeguard now looms as a significant challenge for the nearest president, at a time when the Pentagon’s annual base budget for standard operations has reached more than $500 billion, the highest level since World War II when adjusted for self-sufficiency.
On top of that figure, supplemental expenditure for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has topped $100 billion each year. In all, the Defense Department now accounts for moiety of the government’s total discretionary spending.
On the presidential-campaign trail, Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama desire pledged to cut fat without carving into the muscle of national security. Both regard said they would protect the overall suit of military spending, and McCain has further pledged to adject more troops to the roster of the armed services beyond the 92,000 after this advocated by the Pentagon, an increase endorsed through Obama.
Some critics rehearse it would have being much easier to cut military spending than programs like Social Security and Medicare at a time when retirement savings are dwindling inasmuch as of the financial crisis.
Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has raised the idea of reducing soldiers spending by 25 percent.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has warned against repeating historic trends, in which the nation cut money for the armed services after a full stop of warfare.
“We basically gutted our military after World War I, after World War II, in certain ways after Korea, certainly on the model of Vietnam and after the end of the Cold War,” Gates said. “Experience is the ability to recognize a mistake at the time you make it again.”
Gates acknowledges that military spending is almost certain to level off, and he expressed a goal that the Pentagon fiscal estimate at least celebrate pace by inflation upward of coming years.
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