

Whoa! $78 billion gone from the defense budget! Robert Gates must have revved up his chainsaw like Ash from Evil Dead!

Actually, despite what some breathless headlines say this morning, the changes that the defense secretary made to the Pentagon's ledger are fairly modest. That $78 billion figure? In context, it means that over the next five years, the Pentagon will spend $78 billion less than it projected it would. Non-war spending will remain in the ballpark of over half a trillion dollars; Gates said the budget for fiscal 2012 will be $553 billion.

What really happened is that Gates and the White House stopped increasing the military's cash. The following years' budgets will grow less steeply than they did in previous years – only between one and two percent higher – and by fiscal 2015, they'll flatline. In the past, Gates has talked about the military's financial "spigot" closing. Under this plan, the tap will flow at essentially the current rate – still more than President Bush's first post-9/11 Pentagon budgets. With inflation, you'll see the budgetary numbers grow somewhat over the next few years, but not significantly.

As we've been reporting, the "efficiencies initiative" was all about dealing with that impending flatline. The plan takes billions from less-important or wasteful programs and puts them into more-valued ones, like drones and a brand-new bomber – $154 $100 billion, as it turned out – so that the military doesn't come under a heavy budget crunch. Want to buy another Littoral Combat Ship, flaws and all? The Navy's getting one. Gates held the line on defense spending.

And that's what distinguishes the plan Gates announced yesterday from those of budget-cutters like the White House deficit commission. Those proposals took the $100 billion Gates wanted to reinvest in the military over five years and removed it from the Pentagon's hands. Gates blasted them as "math, not strategy," a line he repeated yesterday to warn against deeper cuts. Winslow Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information, a longtime advocate for precisely those kinds of cuts, emailed reporters that Gates' plan "sounds like fighting words to me."

But that doesn't mean advocates for greater military spending are happy, either. John Noonan, a policy adviser for the conservative Foreign Policy Initiative, contrasted the Gates plan with the Obama administration's domestic agenda. "It’s unacceptable that the only place the Administration deems worthy of fiscal restraint is the defense budget, after they ballooned entitlement spending by over 17 percent in a single year," Noonan says. "Punishing the Pentagon by demanding a new round of cuts, after the they were the only principle federal agency to do so, is irresponsible and ill advised."

Expect to hear similar contrasts from the right – painting the White House, not Gates as the enemy, and de-emphasizing the plan itself. After meeting with Gates yesterday, Rep. Buck McKeon, the new chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, lamented, "We didn't expect to hear that before these efficiencies can be realized, the White House and [the Office of Management and Budget] have demanded that the Pentagon cut an additional $78 billion from defense over the next five years."

Again, that $78 billion sounds dramatic, so don't expect it to go away during the next months' worth of budget fighting. But advocates of greater military spending worried aloud yesterday that Gates has them pinned between overall budget pressures and the modestness of his plan. If anyone's going to be dissatisfied, it's those who wanted to see strategic priorities seriously realigned and defense cash really cut.

All of which Gates anticipated yesterday. "No doubt these budget forecasts and related program decisions will provoke criticism on two fronts," he said, "that we're either gutting defense or we have not cut nearly enough." When congressional hearings on the plan begin, watch Gates use variants of that line to shut the opposition down.

Update, 10:45 a.m.: Apologies for conflating two numbers here. The military services will see $100 billion reinvested over the next five years, while the Defense Department is going to lose $54 billion in overhead during that time. Thanks to the ever-alert @InkSpotsGulliver for pointing out my error.

Photo: U.S. Air Force

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