President Obama’s Pentagon budget proposal exceed’s last year’s request by $1 billion and CAP defense budget experts Lawrence Korb, Alex Rothman and Max Hoffman think the White House can do better. “This is a missed opportunity to realign our national security priorities,” they write in a new brief, adding, “Unnecessary defense spending does not make us safer; it diverts resources away from other critical investments here at home that create jobs and rebuild our infrastructure.”

The report notes that in 2011, the United States spent more on its military than the next 13 biggest spenders combined (a majority of those nations are U.S. allies) and note that Obama’s defense budget proposal maintains an “unwillingness to return military spending to prewar levels or historical norms in real terms.”

The authors agree with the Obama administration that sequestration is not the best way to reduce military spending, and note that winding down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — an era of unprecedented levels of defense spending — provide an opportunity to bring down U.S. military spending, as their graphic illustrates:

CAP released a report last year outlining some spending reductions that are not only politically feasible but also maintain American national security and military dominance:

Eliminate the Navy’s purchase of the troubled over-budget F-35C jet and instead purchase the effective and affordable F/A-18E/F jet. Savings: about $17 billion over 10 years.

Reduce the size of our ground forces to their prewar levels. Savings: about $16 billion over the next decade.

Reform the Pentagon’s outdated health care programs. Savings: roughly $40 billion over 10 years.

Reduce the number of deployed nuclear weapons to 1,100 by 2022 from about 1,700 today. Savings: more than $28 billion over 10 years.

“The United States faces no existential threats or rival superpowers,” Korb, Rothman and Hoffman write. “We should not be spending as much on defense as we did during the Cold War. Returning the defense budget to historical norms will force the Pentagon to better manage its affairs and will help ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent responsibly.”

In deciding on how best to deal with our deficit crisis, the prospect of cutting the defense budget has been a point of heated debate. As the federal government grapples with the effects of sequestration, the House passed a bill this week that will cushion the effects of the cuts for the Pentagon while leaving other agencies to bear their full brunt. There are a few highly misleading ideas that have cropped up in the defense spending debates that detract from a productive conversation. Here are three popular ideas, or “myths,” that deserve a closer look as this bill makes its way to the Senate.

Myth #1: Measuring defense spending as a percentage of GDP is a good way to gauge our defense capabilities.

In no way does measuring defense spending as a percentage of GDP accurately represent the capabilities of our military to execute its missions. Consider how we calculate GDP and all of the factors that go into it – if private consumption or investment increases more rapidly than defense spending, naturally defense spending will subsequently comprise a smaller percentage of GDP. Does that mean we should increase defense spending if there is no change in the international environment?

Conversely, if the GDP goes down and the threat goes up, should we reduce defense spending? An appropriate level of defense spending should be calculated based on threats and strategy, not an arbitrary percentage of GDP. We should spend more when the country faces an existential threat, as it did in the Cold War and when we go to war, and we should spend less in peacetime – our Gross Domestic Product has nothing to do with it.

Myth #2: Defense cuts will lead to a jump in unemployment.

Defense cuts will result in some job losses in the defense industry, no question about it. However, defense spending is not meant to be a jobs program, nor should we want it to be. The purpose of our defense budget is to ensure that we are able to protect the American people and our nation, regardless of how many people it takes to accomplish that goal. In fact, defense spending is a particularly inefficient job creator: more jobs can be created by putting that money almost anywhere else, like in infrastructure, clean energy, or education. Even tax cuts create more jobs per dollar. If Congress wants to increase employment, they should pass a jobs bill, not pour funds into programs that do little to improve our national security and are inefficient at creating jobs.

With sequestration and the Budget Control Act, Congress has made it clear that cuts to federal spending are coming. But in all likelihood, cutting Pentagon spending will result in less job loss than cutting nonmilitary funding by the same amount.
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Lawrence Korb is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Lauren Linde is an intern at CAP.

A new poll released by the Hill newspaper has found that more voters favor slashing military spending versus cutting spending on domestic programs like Medicare and Social Security in order to reduce the debt and deficit.

While the HIll says the poll results show that American voters think reducing the debt is more important than maintaining domestic and military spending at current levels, they prefer to see the cuts come from the Pentagon:

Forty-nine percent of respondents said they would support cutting military spending, while just 23 percent said they would support slashing Social Security and Medicare. An overwhelming majority, 69 percent, said they would oppose cuts to social programs.

Moreover, 37 percent said the U.S. spends “too much” on the military, 38 percent said “just the right amount” and only 18 percent said “too little.”

The new poll results come as the sequester cuts — totaling $85 billion this year alone — are set to take effect on March 1 if Congress and the White House can’t get a deal done to avert them.

But as far as the sequester’s military reductions are concerned, the arbitrary automatic cuts probably aren’t the best way to reduce the Pentagon’s bloated budget (there are alternatives). But, as CAP Senior Fellow Lawrence Korb noted recently, the military spending sequester would bring DOD’s baseline budget “would return to the fiscal year 2007.”

Even former Defense officials led by former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen agree. “In previous eras, increased defense spending may have been required to maintain security,” the group wrote in a joint statement in December. “That is no longer the case. In our judgment, advances in technological capabilities and the changing nature of threats make it possible, if properly done, to spend less on a more intelligent, efficient and contemporary defense strategy that maintains our military superiority and national security.”