Pentagon advisory group says cuts are “essential”

The Pentagon’s “Defense Business Board” pushing President-Elect Obama to consider cutting some of the Pentagon’s more wasteful programs:

A senior Pentagon advisory group, in a series of bluntly worded briefings, is warning President-elect Barack Obama that the Defense Department’s current budget is “not sustainable,” and he must scale back or eliminate some of the military’s most prized weapons programs.

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The briefings do not specify which programs should be cut, but defense analysts say that prime targets would probably include the new F-35 fight er jet, a series of Navy ship programs, and a massive Army project to build a new generation of ground combat vehicles, all of which have been skyrocketing in cost and suffering long development delays.

Such cuts would affect the New England economy. General Dynamics builds warships and submarines in Maine and Connecticut, while Raytheon, Massachusetts’ largest employer, is involved in numerous weapons programs from ships to missile defenses and satellites.

Pentagon insiders and defense budget specialists say the Pentagon has been on a largely unchecked spending spree since 2001 that will prove politically difficult to curtail but nevertheless must be reined in.

Arguably, one of the largest obstacles to the progressive project (at least in the long term) is the sheer scale of military appropriations.  The Pentagon’s proposed budget for 2009 (not including spending on Iraq and Afghanistan) is $515 billion. That is a substantial increase over 2008’s budget, and the Joint Chiefs are proposing an additional $450 billion on top of that over the next five years.  As the Defense Business Board notes, a good deal of these spending increases are going towards wasteful — and in some cases, strategically unnecessary — development.

A simple ten percent cut in Pentagon funding would be more than enough (four times more, in fact) to both pay for a universal pre-K program (estimated $10 billion annually) and provide a needed 250 million mosquito nets worldwide (estimated $3 billion).  The latter of which would probably have more impact with regards to national security than spending $30 billion on the Joint Strike Fighter program.  But, as long as Pentagon spending is so ridiculously high, it will unfortunately crowd out spending for progressive domestic and foreign policies.