Cut the Military Budget--I

The cardinal rule of bargaining is that the first number you propose should never be the number you actually think you can get, and nobody knows this better than the Defense Department. In September the Army Times reported that the Pentagon was preparing to box the new president in to a major increase in military spending by drawing up a budget before the election had been decided. The number it eventually leaked was $584 billion, a whopping increase of $68.6 billion over last year. It was kind of like telling the new boss that your old boss had already agreed to give you a $100,000 raise. In any other context, the sheer hubris would get you fired or laughed out of the room.

But the Pentagon budget is ruled by the appropriations equivalent of quantum physics, in which the normal rules of constraint do not apply. We still don't know how much the Obama administration is planning to give the Pentagon--the announcement of the number has been postponed--but reports indicate the number will likely be $527 billion, around an 8 percent increase instead of the 12 percent the Pentagon requested.

Despite that fact, propagandists like neoconservative Robert Kagan are already crying foul, arguing that the increase is insufficient and--more insidious--will cost jobs at a time when we're losing half a million a month. Military spending "is exactly the kind of expenditure that can have an immediate impact on the economy," Kagan recently wrote in the Washington Post, and any cuts would be a sign to the world that "the American retreat has begun."

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