House Armed Services Chairman Buck McKeon (R-CA) is a man on a mission. He’s making the rounds on Capitol Hill to convince his colleagues, particularly those on the 12-member Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, that they should avoid cutting defense spending. McKeon has a point — and it’s one that is backed up by Heritage calculations from Congressional Budget Office data. This chart reveals that even if defense spending was eliminated entirely, entitlements would continue to fuel the debt crisis. Making reforms to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is …
There is considerable misunderstanding about what the new debt ceiling law does to the area of defense. Many people are describing the required defense cuts in terms of dollar-figure reductions. A recent article appearing in The Cable, for example, referred to a $350 billion reduction for defense. These descriptions are abstract at best, because the law itself does not give a baseline dollar amount from which cuts would be made. Instead, it gives two scenarios for cuts to take place: spending caps or automatic cuts. Spending caps. The debt ceiling …
According to two top officials, the Navy is operating at an “unsustainable” pace for its current force structure. At a House Armed Services Committee hearing recently, Vice Admirals William Burke and Kevin McCoy described a force that was falling into disrepair and struggling to cover ever-increasing responsibilities with decreasing manpower and money. The Navy’s maintenance issues began in the 1990s when Washington sought a post–Cold War peace dividend. One of the first casualties was manpower, and that led to smaller Navy maintenance crews. At first, the Navy tried to get …
A battle continues to rage in Washington over the 2011 federal budget, and a long-term war on how to cut the $14.3 trillion dollar deficit is about to begin. But as political opponents spar over spending, the United States military is waging a real war in Afghanistan, helping to stabilize Iraq, conducting operations across the globe from Libya to Yemen, Haiti to Somalia, and providing assistance to Japan following its natural disaster. With the prospect of a government shutdown looming, some in Congress have rightly devoted special attention to ensuring …
In a few weeks, President Obama will submit his fiscal year (FY) 2011 defense budget request to Capitol Hill along with a myriad of important supporting documents including the Future Years Defense Program (FYDP), long-range shipbuilding and aviation plans, and the Quadrennial Defense Review. While many expect a minimal topline increase for defense spending again in FY 2011 (one to two percent real growth), this modest bump is still insufficient to pay all the Pentagon bills. The underfunding of defense plans has become predictable and why many analysts discount as …
