House Republicans have passed their plan to avoid cuts to the defense budget. And the House Armed Services Committee, under Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon’s (R-CA) leadership, even boosted the budget by $8 billion. Neither Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey nor Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta had requested the larger budget and new polling data shows that 65 percent of Americans think defense spending is already too high.

But while the military’s leadership and the American public are all opposed to the House Republicans’ ballooned defense budget — which includes a $5 billion missile defense project described by Dempsey as totally unnecessary — Armed Services Committee member Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA) took to CNN this morning to pushback against the critics of the proposed budget. Forbes was asked about the polling data and responded:

Do [the American public] really want a reduction in capacity? I think when they hear the president and many people over in the Senate talking about the fact that they can have some of these cuts but still maintain the security of the United States I think any of us would want those reductions. But I think when you ask the American people ‘Do they really want to reduce the security of the United States of America?’ I think the answer comes back they don’t. They want to make sure that we’re maintaining and guaranteeing that security.

Watch him:

But Forbes’ questions were answered yesterday. Panetta warned that ignoring the spending blueprint submitted by himself and Dempsey, as the Congressional Republicans have done, could actually hurt national security. He told reporters:

If members try to restore their favorite programs without regard to an overall strategy, the cuts will have to come from areas that could impact overall readiness. There is no free lunch here. Every dollar that is added will have to be offset by cuts in national security.

And the polling data showed that Americans are surprised by the size of discretionary defense spending when viewed alongside discretionary spending for other budget items. “This suggests that Americans generally underestimate the size of the defense budget and that when they receive balanced information about its size they are more likely to cut it to reduce the deficit,” said Steven Kull, director of the Program for Public Consultation.

The defense budget has emerged as one of the most hotly debated congressional issues this week. Disagreements over a $5 billion missile defense site — Republicans say the facility is necessary but Democrats, along with the Pentagon, report the project is unnecessary — was eventually backed by the House Armed Services Committee under Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon’s (R-CA) chairmanship. And in the presidential race, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, if elected, would increase military spending $2.1 trillion and hasn’t said how he would pay for it.

While House Republicans and the Romney campaign are eager to preserve, if not expand, the Pentagon’s budget, new polling data shows that Americans underestimate the size of the defense budget and, after seeing information on the size of defense spending, endorse defense spending cuts.

The poll, conducted by the Center for Public integrity, the Program for Public Consultation (PPC) and the Stimson Center finds that when shown the discretionary budget for national defense alongside the discretionary budgets for education, veterans’ benefits, homeland security and various other spending areas, 65 percent of respondents found Defense spending to be more than what they had expected. Overall, respondents would cut the budget by 18 percent. Republicans cut an average of 12 percent and Democrats 22 percent.

The respondents’ high support for cutting the defense budget might be explained by the presentation of discretionary defense spending alongside other budget items. “This suggests that Americans generally underestimate the size of the defense budget and that when they receive balanced information about its size they are more likely to cut it to reduce the deficit,” said Steven Kull, director of PPC.

By a large percentage, the poll showed that Americans favored cutting the budget for nuclear weapons (27 percent) but the budget for existing ground forces was picked by respondents for the biggest cuts in dollar terms, $36.2 billion in average cuts or 23 percent.

While the Romney campaign and the GOP-controlled House Armed Services Committee appear intent on protecting existing military spending and introducing new projects for funding — whether the Pentagon asks for it or not — the U.S. public is firmly opposed to the current defense spending levels.

The defense industry is known as a major lobbying power in Congress but the industry’s sharp uptick in campaign contributions, the majority of which are designated to Republicans, in the 2012 political cycle indicates that defense contractors are making a strong rightward shift in their political giving.

Defense industry contributions to individual candidates and PACs reached nearly $13 million earlier this month. That number, only $11 million short of the $24 million contributed in the 2008 political cycle, suggests that the defense industry will contribute more in this political cycle than in any previous election. And the increase in funds is matched by a dramatic partisan shift in the industry’s contributions.

In 2008, 51 percent of contributions went to Democrats while 49 percent were designated for Republicans. In 2010, that trend continued with 53 percent going to Democrats and 47 percent to Republicans. But the 2012 cycle appears to mark a shift in partisan bent as a whopping 60 percent of defense industry campaign dollars went to Republican campaigns.

When contacted by Politico, General Dynamic spokesman Kendell Pease explained that the Republican majority in Congress could explain the shift in campaign dollars toward the GOP:

Those are the folks that are here. Those are the folks that are making decisions now, today, and it’s very easy to figure out where they stand on issues that we feel are most important. We continue to support those folks, both House and Senate, who support those issues that we feel are most important.

Indeed, supporting Republicans has paid off. A budget proposal put forward by Mitt Romney would add $100 billion to the Pentagon’s budget by 2016, while imposing cuts on health care for the poor and disabled and reductions in funding for food inspection, border security and education. And a House Republican budget proposal calls for $554 billion in defense spending in 2013, a $29 billion increase over the White House’s proposal.

As chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA) has found himself the biggest recipient of defense industry dollars, taking in over $393,000 in the 2012 political cycle. The defense industry, apparently eager to repay McKeon for fearlessly defending the defense industry from budget cuts, has extended its largess to his wife, Patricia McKeon, who took in at least $19,200 in defense industry campaign contributions for her California State Assembly campaign (where national defense is not at issue). But McKeon denies the contributions were the result of arm twisting or repayment for his work in protecting the defense budget as budget cuts sweep across Washington. “She’s made lots of friends [in Washington],” McKeon told the Los Angeles Times. “When they found out she was running, they offered to help.”

A group of Senators led by Arizona Republicans John McCain and Jon Kyl today unveiled a bill to try to prevent nearly $500 billion in cuts to military spending, which were mandated after the congressional debt commission’s super committee failed to agree on where to trim $1.2 trillion from the federal budget.

Their plan calls for delaying the implementation of the mandatory spending cuts one year (in to 2014) in order to figure out how to offset the reductions. The Republicans don’t plan on raising taxes however. Instead, they want to cut federal jobs and freeze federal workers’ pay, Reuters reports:

The new proposal by McCain, Kyl and four other Senate Republicans would spare the military and selected domestic programs of cuts set to go into effect in January 2013. The $127 billion in budget savings would be achieved, instead, by scaling back the federal workforce and freezing its pay.

The move is designed to buy time for lawmakers to decide on more orderly reductions than the across-the-board cuts put in place after a special congressional committee failed to develop a deficit reduction plan last year, a Republican aide said.

“Let’s not let a domestic issue such as tax increases interfere…with our nation’s security,” McCain said at the bill’s unveiling on Capitol Hill today. In fact, the military can more than afford the extra $500 billion in cuts. Not only has the U.S. defense budget doubled in the last 10 years, the U.S. spends more than the next 14 countries combined. Indeed, as Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) said, “it’s difficult, but it is not super hard” to make the reductions.

Democrats, however, balked at the plan. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) called the bill “unfair.” Referring to the fact that McCain and many of his GOP colleagues had indeed voted for the plan that ended up resulting in the sequester cuts, Reid added, “I believe that an agreement is an agreement. I believe that a handshake is a handshake. Here we have more than a handshake – we have a law that is in place in our country. They should keep their word. That’s what the American people expect them to do, and that’s what I expect them to do.”

Last November, Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA) earned his keep as the top congressional recipient of defense industry campaign contributions fiercely fighting back against military spending cuts and claiming that defense expenditures are the the only form of government spending that can create jobs. McKeon’s unique pro-defense industry fiscal policy was so appreciated by defense contractors that it appears they are throwing their financial weight behind his wife’s campaign for a seat in the California Assembly.

Lee Fang reports that Patricia McKeon received at least $19,200 in contributions from defense contractors or their registered lobbyists in her first few months of fundraising. McKeon’s run for the California assembly occurs as defense contractors are working to mitigate impending defense budget cuts which could affect their bottom line.

The influx of funding from defense contractors for a California State Assembly campaign doesn’t make much sense from an influence peddling standpoint as Patricia McKeon’s most high profile campaign plank has been to call for an end to plastic bag taxes [PDF]. But the campaign contributions overlap with her husband’s efforts to protect the defense industry from his perch as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Fang writes:

Lockheed Martin, a company locked in a pitched battle to stave off cuts to the lucrative F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet, cut Patricia McKeon’s campaign a $3,000 check.

Rep. Buck McKeon has rigorously defended the jets, despite growing concerns that the planes will run almost $90 million over budget each.

Donors such as Max Valente, a D.C. defense lobbyist who had already maxed out in contributions to McKeon’s congressional campaign, contributed to Patricia McKeon’s campaign in his only campaign contribution to a state politician.

Fang adds that Patricia McKeon has benefited financially from Buck McKeon’s campaign committee — since 2001 she was paid over $547,584 — but she now appears to have tapped her husband’s cash flush supporters in the defense industry for her own foray into elected politics.

Republicans and their allies on the right reacted yesterday with expected indignation to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s announcement of a 2013 Pentagon budget and five-year plan that flattens previously proposed spending levels. In a statement, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said:

I am deeply concerned that the size and scope of these cuts would repeat the mistakes of history and leave our forces too small to respond effectively to events that may unfold over the next few years.

House Armed Services Chairman Buck McKeon (R-CA) released a statement saying:

This move ignores a critical lesson in recent history: that while high technology and elite forces give America an edge, they cannot substitute for overwhelming ground forces when we are faced with unforeseen battlefields.

And Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s defense policy adviser Max Boot writes in the neoconservative magazine Commentary:

The fault in that line of thinking was displayed in Iraq and Afghanistan, where we quickly found out there was no substitute for a humble rifleman to impose our will on the enemy at bayonet point. Now the Obama administration is fooling itself into thinking we will never have to fight another major ground war again.

The notion that the Obama administration’s cuts to previously proposed budget numbers — which on average over the next two years actually increase the budget but, accounting for inflation, amounts to holding spending steady — are setting up a U.S. inability to fight a ground war or prepare for the next conflict doesn’t hold water. Even if the full amount of nearly $950 billion in reductions are enacted — if sequestered cuts are added to the ones outlined yesterday — the military budget would still be at 2007 levels, when the U.S. was fighting two ground wars.

Furthermore, McClatchy newspapers today notes that “planned reduction in ground forces by 2017 would still leave a larger military than before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” And Center for a New American Security fellow Andrew Exum points out that hardware is much harder to scale up than troop levels should a war arise: “[I]n the event of a major war, you can recruit and train new infantry battalions quicker than you can design and build ships.”

This past August, Congress passed a law requiring a special super committee to design a deficit reduction plan. If this committee failed, then there would be an automatic sequester to cut $1.2 trillion, dividing among non-defense domestic spending and defense spending.

Now that the super committee has announced its failure, these cuts are supposed to be enacted. But they won’t be put in place until 2013, and some in Congress are trying to stop the defense portion of these cuts. House Armed Services Committee chairman Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA) will be introducing legislation to prevent these automatic cuts from ever occurring, and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) says he is working on a similar plan in the Senate.

But it is disingenuous for these lawmakers to now be defending defense pork. After all, both McKeon and McCain supported the bill that created the super committee and mandated these defense cuts if the committee failed.

McKeon actually went on a local news show soon after the passage of the bill and praised its slated cuts, actually saying that he wish it had cut more:

HOST: Give me your assessment of how [the super committee deal] went down. Was this a major coup for the Republican Party?

MCKEON: I don’t think anybody was overjoyed, all of us probably would’ve liked to see more cuts. I think we got all we could get. And that’s good. [...] So, that’s a good thing. Because we’ve been spending way too much money that we don’t have. We’re borrowing over 40 cents for every dollar that we spend. But the apple is so big that it makes the bite seem like it was way too small.

Watch it:

Meanwhile, McCain called the deal “not something that I would’ve written but it is a step forward.” For both these members of Congress to praise and support the super committee law and now to try to undermine it is an act of stunning hypocrisy. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said earlier this month that he feels “bound” by the super committee military spending cuts sequester. “I would feel bound. It was part of the agreement, and so either we succeed or we’re in the sequester,” he said. But McKeon and McCain appear to be cutting and then running away — they’re happy to posture as deficit hawks but then can’t follow through.