Is There a Chance to Cut Defense Spending?

The bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, known on television as "the deficit commission" and on progressive blogs as "the catfood commission" (in honor of what it could leave our senior citizens dining on), has not yet released its proposals for reducing the deficit, but the two chairmen, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, have published their own set of preliminary proposals that include reducing the military budget by $100 billion. The proposal is, in part, vague but -- in a new twist for Washington's elite -- even includes a suggested reduction by one-third in spending on the vast empire of bases the U.S. controls globally.

Commission member and Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) has proposed cutting only slightly more -- $110.7 billion -- from the military budget as part of a package of reforms that, unlike the chairmen's proposals, taxes the rich, invests in jobs, and strengthens Social Security. Even if a similar proposal finally makes it out of the full commission, the new Republican House is unlikely to pass anything of the sort unless there is a genuine swell of public pressure.

Far more than $110.7 billion could, in fact, be cut out of the Pentagon budget to the benefit of national security, and even greater savings could, of course, be had by actually ending the Afghan and Iraq wars, a possibility not considered in these proposals. If military cuts are packaged with major cuts to Social Security or just about anything else, progressives will be as likely as Republicans to oppose the package.

David Swanson, Tomdispatch