

Conservatives howled, when word leaked that the Obama White House might be looking to "cut" the Pentagon's budget request for the next fiscal year. But it's only under the odd rules of Beltway bizarroland that this can be considered in any way a trim.

As *CQ's *Josh Rogin reports, Team Obama wants an eight percent, $40 billion increase in the Defense Department budget – from $487.7 billion in 2009 to $527.7 billion in 2010. But this uptick is only about half the size as the one the Joint Chiefs originally requested, in a $584 billion draft budget, complied last fall. So cue the all-too-predictable cries of Obama-as-hippie. "When it comes to the budget it appears that the choices Obama is making are all too reflective of a man who not long ago had the most liberal voting record in the Senate," sniffs Max Boot.

Oh, please. The

$527 billion figure is "what the Bush people thought was the right number last February and that’s the number we’re going with," an Office of Management and Budget official tells Rogin. "The Joint Chiefs did that to lay down a marker for the incoming administration that was unrealistic. It’s more of a wish list than anything else."

*Defense budget experts have said the draft by the Joint Chiefs, which was never publicly released, was designed to pressure the Obama administration to drastically increase defense spending or be forced to defend a reluctance to do so. Defense officials in past outgoing administrations have left inflated budget estimates for incoming officials in the hope of raising the spending baseline. In fact, the draft budget was never scrubbed by Bush’s OMB, which had told federal agencies to submit draft budgets based on “current services.”

I'm not even sure the Defense Secretary is interested in the Joint Chiefs'

mongo increases. For more than a year, Robert Gates has been talking about how the Pentagon's bloated budgets are going to have to come to an end. In December, a member of his team said the new fiscal attitude was "going to be more of a Wal-Mart approach than a Gucci approach." In testimony before Congress last week, Robert Gates talked about making "hard choices" in the 2010 budget.

I'm hearing rumblings from his shop about major cuts to defense programs, coming soon. And I'm talking real one - not Washington-style semantic trims.

UPDATE: On the other hand, Spencer Ackerman hears that Gates "may send OMB a letter objecting to the $527 billion (outside of the wars!) ceiling. I’m trying to learn more about that now. Could it be that despite the resource-shift talk, Gates doesn’t mind a little budgetary good-cop-bad-cop?"

And how much is the budget gonna change, really? The $487.7 billion figure for 2009 doesn't include $25 billion more for military construction, notes Travis Sharp, with the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Will the 2010 figure? And how does the stimulus bill's billions for military construction figure in?

[Photo: USAF]

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