Defense Secretary Robert Gates dropped the hammer Monday on the Pentagon’s entrenched bureaucracy, vowing to close the military’s Joint Services Command, reduce the number of admirals and generals by 50 and senior civilian employees by 150 in the next two years, eliminate two Pentagon agencies and cut Pentagon intelligence contracts by 10 percent. The idea is to save money wisely before Congress wades in with a Weed Whacker. Gates hopes the Pentagon budget will keep growing, but at a more modest 1 percent a year instead of the 7 percent a year that it has grown since 2001. Gates is a business-oriented Republican who serves a Democratic president, giving him the sort of credentials he’ll need to fight off the inevitable complaints that he is weakening the military. The Obama administration has proposed spending $708.2 billion on defense this year, which includes a $548.9 base budget and $159.3 billion for Afghanistan and Iraq. Adjusted for inflation, that’s the highest military budget since World War II. This can’t go on forever. For too long, pork has been disguised as patriotism. We can end that rationally, to the nation’s benefit, as Gates has proposed. Or we can watch congressional food fights break out. — St. Louis Post-Dispatch
There’s plenty to wonder about in regards to Monday’s announcement. A small group of Pentagon insiders made the decision without the stakeholders’ input. They sought no advice from and showed no regard for the leaders who were elected to represent the communities that will be affected by the closure. And the assumptions that underlie their decision remain largely hidden from the public. Why choose national defense as the ground upon which this spendthrift administration makes its stand for fiscal conservatism? After two years and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of bailouts, buyouts and nationalized this and that, finally someone associated with Barack Obama’s White House decides to hold the line on spending — and it’s on national defense. The Obama administration must be convinced to reconsider this irrational, shortsighted plan. — Suffolk (Va.) News-Herald
