During Wednesday’s presidential debate, Mitt Romney didn’t dispute President Obama’s criticism that the Republican candidate has pledged to raise military spending by an additional $2 trillion. Romney repeatedly promised throughout the back and forth that he would both cut taxes and reduce the deficit, despite his desire to boost military expenditures, and didn’t say how the math would work out.

Throughout the debate, Obama raised the military spending issue a total of four times, for example:

OBAMA: Now, Governor Romney’s proposal that he has been promoting for 18 months calls for a $5 trillion tax cut on top of $2 trillion of additional spending for our military. And he is saying that he is going to pay for it by closing loopholes and deductions. The problem is that he’s been asked a — over a hundred times how you would close those deductions and loopholes and he hasn’t been able to identify them.

Romney has said that he would tie military spending to 4 percent of GDP, which would mean a $2.1 trillion increase over 10 years. Even under during the George W. Bush years, the base defense budget made up an average 3.3 percent of GDP.

CAP’s Lawrence Korb foundthat Romney’s claim to slash the deficit didn’t mesh with such an increase in military spending. The resulting boost in military spending is charted out here:

At no time did Governor Romney dispute that figure, nor did he offer up how he intended to pay for such an increase, which the Center for Budget and Policy Priorites has said would necessitate large cuts in Medicaid, education, and other programs. Watch the clip from the debate:

Perhaps Romney’s silence meant conceding defeat. Even his own top foreign policy aides can’t explain how the Republican nominee would pay for such a massive, and completely unnecessary, increase in military spending.

In a speech to the American Legion today, Mitt Romney leveled fresh criticism against President Obama, accusing his administration of cutting the benefits of veterans who are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and going so far as to call plans to cut the Veterans Affairs Department budget a “crisis.”:

Romney charged that the defense budget cuts would affect services for veterans, including the men and women returning from conflict overseas who need psychological counseling. Romney invoked the rising number of suicides – “This is a crisis,” he declared – as he sharpened his attack on the Obama administration’s proposed spending cuts.

But Romney’s claim — that veterans’ care will be negatively impacted by sequestration — is not grounded in reality. Earlier this month, the White House announced that virtually all of the Veterans Affairs Department budget will be exempt from mandatory cuts if and when sequestration goes into effect in January 2013. The only exception, according to VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, would be possible cuts to administrative costs. That means health care, vocational, and education services will remain fully funded while cuts are made elsewhere within the Department of Defense, despite Mitt Romney’s claims to the contrary.

Of course, if Romney were actually concerned about the possibility of losing funding for the Veterans Affairs Department, he probably wouldn’t have embraced Paul Ryan or his budget, which could lead to reductions in veterans’ benefits.

During a fundraiser with wealthy donors earlier this year, Mitt Romney didn’t appear to know how much the United States spends on its military, saying it’s “about twice as much as China.” Mother Jones released video of the entire event this afternoon, after reporting yesterday that during the event, Romney said he’s not worried about the 47 percent of Americans who support President Obama.

Seeming to argue for more military spending, Romney warned the audience not to “over think how strong we are”:

ROMNEY: [The U.S. spends] about twice as much as China, not 10 times as much like is reported. And we have responsibility for the whole world. They’re only focused on one little area of the world, the South China Sea and East China Sea that’s it. And they’re building a military at a rapid rate so this idea that we’ve always spent so much money on the military, it’s like guys, don’t over think how strong we are.

You probably know this was a couple years ago we had one of our aircraft carriers by Japan and the Chinese pulled up behind it in a diesel sub, a super quiet diesel sub pulled up behind it, it could have torpedoed and where did that kind of — our Navy is smaller in number of ships at any time since 1917.

Watch it, which appears at the beginning of this video Mother Jones posted today:

The United States spends about six times more its military than China. Romney said he wants to boost the Pentagon’s budget by $2.1 trillion over 10 years without a plan to pay for it. A recent CAP- National Security Network report warned against “exaggerat[ing] the possible threat posed by China” in arguing for more military spending back home: “Conservatives’ military-first approach, which assumes the two nations are destined for conflict, is more likely to create that reality.”

The Hill reports that House Minority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) invoked the memory of 9/11 victims to argue against military spending cuts:

“We honor those who fell 11 years ago today. We honor those who fought to try to save some of those who died,” Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said in a press conference following a closed-door conference meeting. “The best thing that we can do as a people to honor those individuals is to make sure that it never happens again, and we have looming massive defense cuts that this House has acted to substitute.”

The “looming massive” cuts Cantor refers to is the nearly $500 billion military spending sequester mandated by the Budget Control Act. There are perhaps a variety of reasons that (mainly) Republicans warn against these cuts but Cantor is moving into different territory by using the memory of 9/11 victims to make his case.

The reality is that, while the arbitrary automatic cuts probably aren’t the best way to reduce the Pentagon’s bloated budget (there are alternatives), the military spending sequester would bring DOD’s baseline budget back to 2006 levels.

Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan has gotten in hot water before for criticizing President Obama for the very same defense cuts that he voted for in 2011. When confronted with this incongruity today on Face The Nation, Ryan simply denied that he ever voted for the cuts, telling an incredulous Norah O’Donnell that he didn’t actually vote for the cuts he’s on record as voting for:

O’DONNELL: Now you’re criticizing the President for those same defense cuts you’re voting for and called a victory.

RYAN: No, no — I have to correct on you this, Norah. I voted for a mechanism that says the sequester will occur if we don’t cut $1.2 trillion in government. … We can get into this nomenclature; I voted for the Budget Control Act. But the Obama Administration proposed $478 billion in defense cuts. We don’t agree with that, our budget rejected that, and then on top of that is another $500 billion in defense cuts in the sequester.

O’DONNELL: Right. A trillion dollars in defense spending, and you voted for it!

RYAN: No, Norah. I voted for the Budget Control Act.

O’DONNELL: That included defense spending!

RYAN: Norah, you’re mistaken.

Watch it:

O’Donnell is, in fact, not mistaken. The Budget Control Act, as passed, included both the roughly $600 billion in “sequestration” cuts that will happen if there’s no compromise on the budget by December as well as the $487 billion of military-supported cuts that will take place regardless. The fact that Ryan may have wished that the bill didn’t contain said defense cuts does not absolve him of the fact that he and 201 other Republicans voted for the bill as-passed.

Moreover, Ryan’s statement after voting for the bill contained not a single word of criticism about the defense cuts. As O’Donnell correctly noted, Ryan said the bill “represents a victory for those committed to controlling government spending and growing our economy” and that “The agreement – while far from perfect – underscores the extent to which the new House majority has successfully changed Washington’s culture of spending.” It’s at best misleading, and at worst an outright lie, for Ryan to assert that voting for the Budget Control Act did not mean voting for defense cuts.

Mitt Romney, campaigning in Virginia today, hammered President Obama for supporting cuts in defense spending.

NBC’s David Gregory, in an interview with Romney scheduled to be aired in full tomorrow, noted that the cuts were part of the compromise to end the debt ceilling crisis and were supported by the entire GOP leadership. An excerpt:

MITT ROMNEY: Well, I want to maintain defense spending at the current level of the GDP. I don’t want to keep bringing it down as the president’s doing. This sequestration idea of the White House, which is cutting our defense, I think is an extraordinary miscalculation in the wrong direction.

DAVID GREGORY: Republican leaders agreed to that deal to the extend the debt ceiling.

MITT ROMNEY: And that’s a big mistake. I thought it was a mistake on the part of the White House to propose it. I think it was a mistake for Republicans to go along with it.

Among the GOP leaders who made “a big mistake” and voted for the cuts was his running mate, Paul Ryan. That hasn’t stopped Paul Ryan, however, from also crticizing the sequestor on the campaign trail.

In an interview with Fox News this afternoon, Mitt Romney shot back at critics who complained that he didn’t mention Afghanistan or praise U.S. troops in his convention speech last week, arguing that he focused on issues that are “important.”

Fox News’s Brett Baier told Romney that “several speakers” at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte this week criticized the GOP presidential nominee for the omissions (actually it was right-wing foreign policy leader Bill Kristol who started the attacks) and asked him if he had any regrets. “I only regret you’re repeating it day in and day out,” Romney said, adding that his speech focused on things that are important:

BAIER: To hear several speakers in Charlotte … they were essentially saying that you don’t care about the U.S. military because you didn’t mention U.S. troops and the war in Afghanistan in your nomination acceptance speech. … Do you regret opening up this line of attack, now a recurring attack, by leaving out that issue in the speech.

ROMNEY: I only regret you’re repeating it day in and day out. When you give a speech you don’t go through a laundry list, you talk about the things that you think are important and I described in my speech, my commitment to a strong military unlike the president’s decision to cut our military. And I didn’t use the word troops, I used the word military. I think they refer to the same thing.

Watch the clip:

The war in Afghanistan and the sacrifices made by U.S. troops weren’t important enough for Romney to talk about them in his speech? His speech did mention the military, but only to say that he wants to “preserve” a strong military (incidentally so does Obama). But Kristol’s criticism was not that Romney didn’t mention the military but that he did not pay tribute to U.S. troops who fought or are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But what is Romney’s “commitment to a strong military”? He plans to increase military spending by $2.1 trillion over the next ten years (which the military does not need) without offering a plan to pay for it. That doesn’t sound too much like a strong commitment to the economy.

Last night during his speech to the Democratic National Convention, President Clinton called out Mitt Romney’s reckless plan to increase military spending. “The Republican argument against the president’s re-election was actually pretty simple — pretty snappy,” Clinton said, “It went something like this: We left him a total mess. He hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough. So fire him and put us back in.” The former president then noted that all Romney and the GOP plan to do is go back to Bush era policies and boost military spending without paying for it:

They convinced me they were honorable people who believed what they said and they’re going to keep every commitment they’ve made. We just got to make sure the American people know what those commitments are — (cheers, applause) — because in order to look like an acceptable, reasonable, moderate alternative to President Obama, they just didn’t say very much about the ideas they’ve offered over the last two years.

They couldn’t because they want to the same old policies that got us in trouble in the first place. They want to cut taxes for high- income Americans, even more than President Bush did. They want to get rid of those pesky financial regulations designed to prevent another crash and prohibit future bailouts. They want to actually increase defense spending over a decade $2 trillion more than the Pentagon has requested without saying what they’ll spend it on. And they want to make enormous cuts in the rest of the budget, especially programs that help the middle class and poor children.

Watch the clip:

Indeed, Clinton is right. If elected president, Mitt Romney plans to increase military spending by $2.1 trillion and he has not said how he would pay for it. Back in July, top Romney foreign policy adviser Richard Williamson was asked repeatedly how Romney would pay for the increase but Williamson just dodged the questions and had no real answer.