Like everything else involved in addressing the nation’s debt, cutting defense spending is going to be painful.
Defense contractors will lay off workers. The towns and cities that depend on spending at nearby military bases will feel the pinch.
But the nation must get its expenses in closer alignment with its income, and there is no rational way to do so without cutting the largest military budget in the world.
The Obama administration’s announcement last week of a retooled military strategy is a blueprint for national defense in an era of fiscal constraint.
“We’re turning the page on a decade of war,” President Obama said in announcing the strategic changes.
The administration plans to reduce troop numbers and shrink the U.S. military presence in Europe, and effectively has ruled out future large-scale nation-building efforts such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan.
With the national debt at $15.1 trillion and counting, such a recalibration must occur.
And let’s be realistic, the $480 billion of military cuts planned over the next decade is just 8 percent of the $6 trillion in military spending.
In fact, the most aggressive proposed cuts to military spending — automatic cuts scheduled to begin in 2013 — would only roll the Pentagon’s budget back to 2007 levels. That is, if they actually occur.
Such reductions would hardly be a decimation of the nation’s military capabilities and it certainly wouldn’t render the U.S. a “paper tiger,” as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has direly predicted.
It can be done, and it has been.
Colin Powell, a retired four-star general, has recounted how, at the end of the Cold War two decades ago, he and then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney reduced the military budget by 25 percent. Defense spending, he said, cannot be “sacrosanct,” but cuts have to be targeted and smart. Those reductions helped close budget gaps and contributed to budget surpluses in the 1990s.
That is the mindset that we as a country must get into. No part of the budget can be off limits, yet reductions must be carefully thought out. The president’s plan is a good framework for achieving that end.
