Obama is Reorienting Defense Spending, Not Cutting It

An excellent point from Brian Beutler about the media’s weird framing of the current defense budget debate. Barack Obama and Robert Gates are proposing big cuts in a number of programs in order to finance increased spending on other aspects of defense that they think are more important. This, though, is being reported as if they’re taking an ax to the defense budget, when they’re not:

In other words, by retooling the Pentagon, Obama and Gates plan to move a lot of money around, but they also plan to increase the overall defense budget. In the final year of the Bush administration (and excluding the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) the defense budget was $513 billion. In FY 2010, if Gates and Obama get their way, it will be $534 billion–$534 billion that will be spent much differently than last year’s outlays were.

But you’d never know that from the news coverage.

This does relate to the prospects for overall reductions in defense spending, since if it proves politically impossible to do a restructuring of the Pentagon budget that would indicate that it’s not politically possible to ever cut it. But the actual program here reflects a philosophical disagreement about the nature of defense spending. Relative to his predecessors, Gates and Obama are trying to put less emphasis on expanding the technological gap between the United States and other major countries, and put more emphasis on relatively flexible systems, on the military’s human capital, and on the ability to do low-intensity operations.

Framing the spending shift willy-nilly as “cuts” helps allow the defenders of the status quo to paint themselves as more committed to national defense than their opponents. In reality, they’re just more committed to parochial interests.