Gates Does Military Budget Shell Game Again

By Steve Hynd

You've got to hand it to Bob Gates, he's a sharp operator. Last year, he offered up such shiny-toy boondoggles as the Army's Future Combat Sytems as sacrificial lambs that turned out to be red herrings and secured a 4% military budget increase even as many pundits hailed the Obama administration for making military cuts.

It worked so well, he's trying it again this year. Josh Rogin writes:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates's bombshell announcement that he will close Joint Forces Command as part of sweeping reforms of the defense bureaucracy is being seen around the defense community as a preemptive move against congressional efforts to cut the defense budget.

The moves, which also include shutting down DOD's Business Transformation Agency, closing the office of networks and information integration, cutting contractors, general officers, and the size of the Pentagon's administrative staff, all come only weeks after Congress proposed $8 billion of cuts in the defense budget for next year, manifested in the Senate Appropriations Committee's markup of the fiscal 2011 spending allocations.

Gates was clear that his goal is protect at least 1 percent growth in the defense budget in perpetuity, by showing Congress and the greater defense community that his department is managing its money well and therefore deserves to receive increasing budgets even though defense funding has more than doubled since 2001.

....Similar to the way Gates has rolled out other controversial decisions, such as his announcement last year that he would end several big-ticket weapons projects, Gates made his move when Congress was out of town, ensuring a muted congressional reaction. Gates also held a number of background meetings and briefings with experts and other interested parties to answer questions and get some buy-in.

But the real indication of Gates's savvy was in the fact that he left the recommendations vague enough as to not give any specific interest groups a good reason to oppose them in the near term. A 10 percent reduction in contractors sounds great, but without knowing which contractors, it's hard to find a lawmaker or corporation that is willing to raise a protest.

This time, though, there might be some pushback.

Some former officials noted that Gates's initiatives attempt to preempt the ongoing national discussion over whether the defense budget should actually go down after years of huge increases. The president's debt commission is said to be looking at defense as part of its effort to find savings.

"You don't get a deal on the deficit unless you deal with defense," said Gordon Adams, who headed national-security budgeting in the Clinton White House. "What he's asking to do is freeze the defense budget at the absolute peak of the curve."

The perfect budget predator continues it's destructive lifestyle. It simply gobbles up its own food heedlessly and leaves whatever is left to be shared between its less-able competitors.

I don't expect any of the Republican "deficit hawks" to make any noise about this shell game - they're all phonies who abandon their deficit hawkery as soon as an opportunity for war hawkery presents itself. But what about Democrats?