Republicans are using almost $1 trillion in potential defense cuts as a wedge issue. GOP turns defense cuts on Obama

The biggest political threat that President Barack Obama could face in military towns like Norfolk and Fayetteville and Tampa isn’t criticism that he’s pulling out of Afghanistan or Iraq too early.

It’s his refusal, so far, to roll back automatic cuts to the Pentagon that could damage local economies already bracing for a drawdown in defense funding.


Republicans are using almost $1 trillion in potential defense cuts as a wedge issue with a jobs twist, aiming to weaken Obama where it could hurt him most: in a handful of top-tier battleground states such as Virginia, Colorado, Florida and North Carolina.

Obama’s credentials as a cunning commander in chief — killer of Osama bin Laden, slayer of pirates, steward of two wars — hasn’t given Republicans much to work with on a traditionally strong issue for their party.

But Republicans from presidential candidate Mitt Romney to the party committees to defense hawks in Congress predict trouble for Obama on the military jobs front as he seeks to capture these states, some of which he won by a hairsbreadth in 2008. Newspapers from Dayton, Ohio, to Colorado Springs, Colo., are already starting to run worst-case-scenario stories, forecasting job losses on bases and among the web of defense contractors, beauty salons and sandwich shops that feed on the military establishment.

Brewing largely under the radar for months, the issue is an election-year subplot that came into sharper relief this week with the release of Obama’s 2013 budget, the first to implement a deficit-reduction plan that slices into defense spending.

“This will not be a small issue. This will be a huge issue,” said Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.), whose district is anchored by South Hampton Roads, where the military dominates the economy. “If I were a presidential candidate, I would be pushing this issue, not just in Virginia but in the rest of the country. I feel comfortable that the [GOP] presidential nominee will play that issue up.”

Forbes said he will announce plans this week for a “nationwide tour” with other lawmakers to draw attention to the impact of the proposed cuts.

If Obama wants to win these swing states again, he needs to convince voters that he’s a strong leader on national defense while making the case that he is honorably and sensibly winding down two wars that were unpopular with service members worn down by multiple deployments. At the same time, he hopes that his efforts over his first term to bolster veterans benefits will bond service members whom he has dubbed the “9/11 Generation” to the Democratic Party.

The cuts in defense spending could complicate his task by swaying voters on the margins, Republicans say.

“You look at a lot of states that were close, and one little move here or there tips it in one direction,” said Sean Spicer, communications director for the Republican National Committee. “In a lot of states, it is a game of inches.”

North Carolina, which Obama won by 1 percentage point, relies heavily on defense contractors. Virginia, which Obama won by 5 points, could take the second-largest hit in the country — 122,000 job losses, behind only California — over the next 10 years, according to a George Mason University analysis commissioned by the Aerospace Industries Association. Florida, a perennial toss-up, could lose 40,000 jobs, the analysis found.

It remains unclear the extent to which key swing states will face downsizing over the next few years, although Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has warned that the first round of $487 billion in cuts over 10 years “will impact all 50 states, and many districts across America.” Any spending reductions aren’t likely to be felt until after the November election, given the plodding nature of Congress.

Compounding the uncertainty is the scheduled start of a second round of $500 billion in automatic, across-the-board cuts in January 2013. This second batch of spending reductions, forced by Congress’s failure last year to agree on a deficit-cutting package, would be blunt and painful, defense analysts warn. Obama has rejected attempts by congressional Republicans to simply erase these cuts unless they are replaced with an alternative deficit-reduction plan that includes revenue increases.

There’s deep skepticism that Congress will allow the automatic cuts to kick in on schedule. Pentagon officials claim they aren’t even planning for the possibility that the cuts will take effect.

But in a political season, the specter of cuts could be as damaging as the reality, particularly when Obama’s chief rival, Romney, is telling military communities around the country that he would do exactly the opposite.

The administration is proposing to cut 100,000 active-duty troops from the Army and Marine Corps, retire Air Force aircraft and cut the number of Navy ships, delay work on others and retire some more. Obama also wants Congress to approve two new rounds of base closures.

Romney, by contrast, is promising not only to “reverse Obama-era defense cuts” but to add 100,000 active-duty troops and increase naval shipbuilding from nine ships annually to 15 ships.

“I think it was a very poor idea to put on the chopping block the security of the American people,” Romney said during a November visit to Nashua, N.H. “Right here in New Hampshire, jobs would obviously be seriously impacted if the military cuts that the president and this supercommittee had on the table were put through. That would simply be a terrible course.”

He’s delivered this message so far to cadets at The Citadel in Charleston, S.C., to military contractors in Nashua and to supporters in the Florida naval bastion of Pensacola. Aiming to capitalize on Saturday’s caucuses in Maine, home of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, which occupies an island opposite New Hampshire, two of Romney’s special advisers published an op-ed last week contrasting his approach with Obama’s.

“While President Obama is cutting our naval power, Mitt Romney recognizes the value a strong Navy plays in the advancement of American interests,” former Navy Secretary John Lehman and former U.S. Sen. Jim Talent (R-Mo.) wrote in the Portland Press Herald. “If elected, he and his administration will take positive action to grow the economy and dramatically shrink the size of government where appropriate. Shrinking the size of our Navy and military, however, is not on the table.”

The Obama campaign declined to comment on the record.

Douglas Wilson, a top Pentagon spokesman, shrugged off the election-year maneuvering: “I’m sure there are going to be attacks on all parts of this. The strategy was not developed in order to react to political attacks but to prevent and address attacks on the battlefield.”

Democrats say Republicans are latching onto the jobs argument because they lack the traditional Democrats-are-soft-on-defense attack, given Obama’s success in killing high-profile terrorist targets. But even the jobs track could be a dead end for the GOP, Democrats say.

Military commanders signed off on the strategic plan. The cuts this year would amount to $6 billion, or about 1 percent of the Pentagon budget, which will continue to increase over the next 10 years.

And most of all, Republicans — 28 in the Senate, 174 in the House — backed the Budget Control Act, which mandated the first round of military cuts and set up the process that will trigger the second round, unless Congress passes legislation to avert them.

“You can obviously try to scare people,” said Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress and assistant defense secretary in the Reagan administration. “The Budget Control Act was forced on Obama by Republicans. I know Republicans will try to scare [voters], but these are not Obama’s cuts. He can say you forced me to do this.”

Some communities breathed easier after the release Monday of Obama’s budget.

Norfolk Naval Station, for one, emerged as a winner by holding onto its nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. But Virginia’s gain was another swing state’s loss. A cut in military construction funds means the carrier won’t be moving anytime soon to Naval Station Mayport near Jacksonville, Fla., in Duval County, which Obama lost by only 1 point in 2008. The news infuriated local politicians, such as Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-Fla.), who said “it makes no sense.”

Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), a veteran of the first Gulf war and the Iraq War who favors Pentagon cuts but has been critical of Obama’s approach, said he expects the issue to gain more traction in his state and beyond as the election year wears on and more details about the full scope of the defense cuts become known.

“Where it impacts the civic communities, pocketbook issues unfortunately supersede national security issues,” Coffman said. “In communities like Aurora and Colorado Springs, it will become a real pocketbook issue on a bipartisan level.”