Military Spending Must Be Part of the Deficit Debate

The budget compromise reached by the White House and Congress this weekend included a "historic amount of cuts," as House Speaker John Boehner and Senate majority leader Harry Reid said in their joint statement announcing the deal. "The largest annual spending cut in our history," boasted President Obama. Media coverage of the deal hailed the "sweeping" and "across-the-board" nature of the cuts. The Republican leadership has "shifted the focus in Washington away from spending and toward austerity" and slashed government "more steeply than expected," wrote Paul West in the Los Angeles Times.

And yet there is one, massive piece of the federal budget that these brave hawks dared not touch: defense. Not a solitary penny of the $38 billion in spending cuts will come out of the Pentagon's coffers. In fact, defense spending will increase by $5 billion over 2010 levels, to $513 billion. And that doesn't even include the cost of ongoing "overseas contingency operations," otherwise known as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.