Think Progress

Fox News Military Analyst Endorses DADT Repeal, Criticizes McCain For Flip-Flopping

This morning, Fox & Friends Weekend hosted Col. David Hunt, a Fox News military analyst, to discuss whether to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

According to his bio on the Fox News website, Hunt is a retired colonel with “over 29 years of military experience including extensive operational experience in special operations, counter terrorism and intelligence operations.” Hunt generally adheres to the conservative line on national security matters. For instance, he was an advocate for attacking Iraq. And instead of encouraging dialogue with Iran and Syria, Hunt said in 2006, “I think we can talk to them when we line them up and kill them.”

This morning, however, Hunt sided with progressives who are advocating repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. Hunt called the discriminatory law “an abject failure” because “we’ve lost somewhere between 11 and 14,000 soldiers.” He continued:

Being brave in the battlefield has nothing to do with how you go to the bathroom or how you have sex. … If you volunteer to serve this great country, we should welcome you, not push you away because of some arcane attitude about sex.

Even Fox host Clayton Morris agreed. “Yeah, it’s like a civil rights issue. I find it absolutely absurd,” Morris said. Then Morris and Hunt took a swipe at Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who claims to heed the views of military leaders (except those with whom he disagrees):

MORRIS: On the campaign trail, then-Sen. John McCain said, look, when I hear from the military brass that they want to end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, I’ll get right in line with them. That’s what happened — we heard from Admiral Mullen, we heard from Defense Secretary Gates. … Why is John McCain flip-flopping here?

HUNT: It’s just too damn convenient for McCain to be doing this. … He’s just wrong on this. We’re in a war. We’ve got guys deployed for 8 years in Afghanistan, almost 7 years in Iraq. And somebody says, I want to serve this country. And McCain wants to say, if you’re homosexual, you can’t serve. It’s wrong. We need these kind of people. We need all of them.

Hunt said that the repeal of DADT won’t be “easily accepted” by the military because “it’s a conservative organization,” but it’s still the right thing to do in the long-run. Watch it:

Over the past few days, Fox has given ample airtime to those who defend DADT. Bill Kristol called it a “success.” Ollie North derided repeal as a harmful “social experiment.” Bill O’Reilly opposed repeal because “it’s a morale issue.”

A review of Fox News shows over the past month indicates that Hunt – generally, a regular contributor on Fox News – had not been called upon prior to this morning to offer his views on the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. Will Hunt be invited on other Fox News shows to discuss his views?

Axelrod Struggles To Explain Why Obama’s Spending Freeze Doesn’t Include Defense Funding

Yesterday, ThinkProgress joined a handful of journalists for a wide-ranging discussion with David Axelrod, Senior Adviser to President Obama. In his State of the Union address on Wednesday night, Obama announced a discretionary spending freeze that excluded the massive budgets of the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.

“Can you tell the American people that there aren’t any savings to be found in the Defense and Homeland Security budgets?” ThinkProgress asked Axelrod. The President’s Senior Adviser acknowledged, no, “I can’t tell you that” there aren’t savings which can be found there.

Axelrod highlighted prior efforts by the administration to rein in defense spending and insisted that further cuts could still be made. Yet the Pentagon budget — which is expected to exceed $700 billion when Obama unveils his budget on Feb. 1st — remains inexplicably exempt from the spending freeze.

“We live in a dangerous world,” Axelrod said in trying to justify the special exclusion for the defense budget. “What we can’t do at a time when we’re in two wars and we have a very determined enemy in Al Qaeda, we can’t stand down,” he added in an interview with Fox News. Yet, rather than carve out an exclusion to fund troops in the field, the administration opted for a more expansive exclusion. And while cuts might indeed be made to certain programs, the overall Pentagon budget will be allowed to increase without having to face the difficult tradeoffs that other departments will.

Asked whether politics played any part in the decision to carve out a special exclusion for national security-related budgets, Axelrod denied that it did. “There weren’t any meetings that I was in where that was talked about,” he told us.

As Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Lawrence Korb has argued, “If President Obama is serious about controlling spending, he can’t exempt the Pentagon.” And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) concurs, telling reporters yesterday that the entire defense budget “should not be exempted” from the freeze.

Joint Chiefs Stand And Applaud Obama’s Nuclear Comments, Sit Silently During Call To Repeal DADT

Although President Obama spent a significant amount of his State of the Union speech last night talking about domestic issues, he also addressed several national security issues. The Joint Chiefs sat quietly when Obama talked about a timeline to begin the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and committed to working with the military to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell:

And in the last year, hundreds of al Qaeda’s fighters and affiliates, including many senior leaders, have been captured or killed — far more than in 2008. And in Afghanistan, we’re increasing our troops and training Afghan security forces so they can begin to take the lead in July of 2011, and our troops can begin to come home. [...]

This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are. It’s the right thing to do.

However, as Joe. My. God. points out, the Joint Chiefs didn’t sit passively during the entire speech, as the Supreme Court justices are supposed to do, although they traditionally applaud “rarely.” The Joint Chiefs stood and applauded when the President talked about supporting veterans or pledging to secure nuclear materials:

And at April’s Nuclear Security Summit, we will bring 44 nations together here in Washington, D.C. behind a clear goal: securing all vulnerable nuclear materials around the world in four years, so that they never fall into the hands of terrorists.

Watch a compilation:

A new study by UCLA’s Williams Institute estimates that there are an “estimated 66,000 lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals are serving in the US military, accounting for approximately 2.2% of military personnel.” Additionally, repealing DADT “could attract an estimated 36,700 men and women to active duty service and 12,000 more individuals to the guard and reserve.” The Pentagon has reportedly been “stepping up internal discussions on how gay men and lesbians might be able to serve openly in the armed services,” in anticipation that Congress and the President will move forward on repeal.

Notably, Defense Secretary Robert Gates did stand and clap for Obama’s call to repeal DADT. (HT: AMERICAblog)

Spending Freeze Must Include Defense

Our guest blogger is Lawrence J. Korb, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress

If President Obama is serious about controlling spending, he can’t exempt the Pentagon. In announcing a three-year spending freeze, he exempted all security-related funding. This exemption applies to the budgets of the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security, foreign aid and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Because the budgets of these agencies, particularly that of the Pentagon, are responsible for a large and increasing share of the discretionary portion of the federal budget, the president’s spending freeze will have a marginal effect.

Rather than exclude these accounts from the freeze for fear of appearing weak on defense, the president should mandate that the baseline defense budget also be frozen.

Indeed, freezing the base defense budget at its current level of about $532 billion would not hinder the Pentagon’s ability to conduct the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq because they will be funded separately through a $160 billion supplemental. Moreover, freezing defense spending would force the Pentagon to make the hard choices it has avoided over the past decade. In the last ten years, the baseline defense budget nearly doubled from $290 billion in FY2000 to $532 billion, an increase of $242 billion or 83 percent, or more than 8 percent a year. Even if one controls for inflation, the real growth amounts to nearly 50 percent, about 5 percent a year in real terms. By way of contrast, non-defense discretionary spending, which the administration proposes to freeze, has averaged only 5 percent annual growth, or 2 percent real growth during that same period.

Additionally, spending on future weapons systems has outpaced spending on our troops. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments has pointed out (pdf) that the operations and support portion of the base defense budget – which includes costs for recruitment, training, military and civilian personnel pay, and operating and maintaining equipment – has increased. Yet it has risen less in real terms than the investment portion of the budget, which includes procurement, research and development, and construction. The operations and support part has increased by 3.5 percent a year in real terms over the past decade, while the growth in investment has exceeded 5 percent.

To keep the baseline budget level at $532 billion, the Pentagon could reduce the FY2011 projected budget level for weapons development and purchases from about $190 billion to $170 billion. This could be done through a number of reductions in baseline defense spending. In particular, the U.S. government could acquire $20 billion in savings by taking some of the following measures, which I recommended in my recent report, Paying for the Troop Escalation in Afghanistan (pdf):

-Cut missile defense, while maintaining funding for its continued research and development. Saves about $6 billion.
-Keep the Virginia-class attack submarine production steady at one per year instead of ramping up to two per year in FY 2011. Saves about $2 billion
-Cancel the Zumwalt-class DDG-1000 at two ships. Saves about $1 billion
-Cancel the MV-22 Osprey and substitute cheaper helicopters while continuing production of the CV-22. Saves about $2 billion
-Cancel the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle program. Saves about $294 million
-Cut the FY 2011 F-35 purchase to twenty, slow down production of the aircraft, cancel the alternate engine program, and replace the cut planes with drones. Saves about $4 billion
-Cut FY 2011 funding for the Army’s Future Combat Systems by one third. Saves about $763 million
-Continue offensive space-based weapons development at a low rate. Saves about $100 million
-Reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal to 600 deployed warheads and 400 in reserve. Saves about $13 billion

This would still leave the FY 2011 baseline defense budget $15 billion higher in real terms than it was at the height of the Reagan buildup. And by using a unified approach to national security budgeting—which brings together national security spending from the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, State, and the U.S. Agency for International Development—additional funds could be transferred from DOD to the Department of Homeland Security so that its budget is not cut.