Battling the Pentagon

On issues of war and peace, progressives should take heart from the fact that no matter how aggressive the Bush Administration's intentions may be, its ability to carry them out is likely to be severely circumscribed in a second term.

In the wake of the November elections, arms control and peace advocates scored an important victory when Congress eliminated funding for research on new nuclear weapons, including $27.6 million for the macho-sounding Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. The leader in this effort was Republican Representative David Hobson. In another promising sign, the Pentagon took advantage of the slow news week between Christmas and New Year's to leak its plans to cut $30 billion from more than a dozen weapons programs in the next five years. The cuts amount to only a little over 1 percent of the $2.5 trillion planned for the Pentagon's total budget over the next five years, and some represent little more than a budget shell game; as Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress points out, the Pentagon plans to buy one Virginia-class attack submarine per year for the next five years instead of two, but it still plans to buy the same total number. And other proposed cuts may be stopped in their tracks by the arms lobby, once interested members of Congress from Texas, Georgia and beyond team up with contractors like Lockheed Martin to save home-state systems like the F-22 fighter and the C-130J transport plane.

But even allowing for these limitations, the fact that the Pentagon felt compelled to offer any cuts at all provides an important opportunity to debate national security priorities. Budget deficits are running at $300 billion to $400 billion per year, even before accounting for the $2 trillion, ten-year cost of the plan for partial privatization of Social Security. And there is little possibility of postponing budget tradeoffs by throwing more billions onto our national credit card. As popular domestic programs come onto the budgetary chopping block, everything will be up for debate.

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