If we're going to have a federal spending freeze, why not hit the most egregious target--defense pork? Nancy Pelosi is making that argument now, too.

"While we all want to support our men and women in uniform... and our national defense and our veterans, I don't think that we should protect military contractors, and I want to make that distinction very clear," Pelosi said at her weekly press conference Thursday.... "I don't support exempting them from the freeze," she said. "So I think there has to be a bifurcation in terms of: we support our military and their families and we want them to have everything they need, but we do not support an entitlement program for overruns on the part of a military contractor."

That view is supported by a growing number of defense analysts.

Leading defense wonks, particularly those on the left, have harsh words for the exemption. “Ridiculous,” said Laicie Olson of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. “Completely inappropriate,” said Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress. “A political decision,” said Charles Knight of the Project on Defense Alternatives. Obama’s first defense budget, submitted last spring, topped out at $663 billion when including the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — an overall increase from the final Bush administration Pentagon budget — but also terminated major defense programs hated by reformers, including the Air Force’s F-22 fighter jet, the Army’s Future Combat System vehicle and ground-based missile defense. But despite the real-dollar increase, conservatives criticized Obama’s budget when they saw that those program cancellations would bring down future defense spending. Similarly, Obama raised the Department of Homeland Security’s budget to $43 billion from $40 billion.... But while Obama did not rule out future defense cuts in the speech, many of these defense wonks could not understand why an effort at deficit reduction would explicitly exclude defense spending. “Defense spending is over half our discretionary spending,” Olson said. “It would be crazy not to include it. It begs the question whether this is a real effort.” Shortly before the speech, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the speaker of the House, told reporters that any spending freeze ought to include defense spending.... “Its absolutely ridiculous to think that we’re going to cut things like education and spend money on nuclear weapons and programs that don’t work, are faulty, have been faulty for years and continue to waste money,” Olson said.

Defense contracts should not be sacrosanct. A real and effective deficit slicing measure will have to include ending the decades long welfare program those contractors have enjoyed.