By Charles Hoskinson and Austin Wright

On the budget
DOD IS ONE OF THE BIG LOSERS in a budget plan that pours hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending into community colleges, transportation projects and other stimulus programs. It even adds $770 million to promote democracy in the Arab world. If you’re wondering why, here’s the answer: Cutting defense is popular – at least more so than other options. With Democrats resisting any reductions to entitlements or domestic spending and Republicans against new taxes, defense is the only budget line a majority in the divided Congress can agree to cut.

THE PRESIDENT’S BUDGET CONTAINED ONE MAJOR SURPRISE – a combination of tax increases and spending reductions officials said could cover the $1.2 trillion in mandated sequestration due to take place in January. After hounding the White House for months to propose a way out of the sequestration trap, congressional Republicans – who have offered their own proposal to offset the first year of those planned cuts with trims to the federal workforce and a pay freeze – now have their response. “This budget is … fully consistent with the funding levels set by the Budget Control Act passed by Congress,” noted Adam Smith, HASC’s ranking Democrat.

REPUBLICANS LIKED THAT AS MUCH as Democrats had liked the GOP plan, which was not at all. McCain and Graham said the president’s proposal wasn’t serious, noting that he had not heeded warnings from Panetta and others that the additional cuts would be devastating to national security. “Despite these strong warnings, President Obama today failed to offer any serious plan to avoid them in his new budget, and has inexplicably vowed to veto any effort aimed at preventing the cuts that does not raise taxes,” they said.

REPUBLICANS ALSO BLASTED Obama’s decision to count as savings nearly $1 trillion in war funding the administration never planned to spend. The so-called savings – calculated as the difference between actual planned war spending and projections of what spending would be at current levels, adjusted for inflation – was also widely considered to be illusory by analysts.

AS FOR THE DETAILS of the plan to spend $514.2 billion on core Pentagon accounts, $9.6 billion on military construction and $88.5 for war operations, analysts and lawmakers will be looking in the coming days to see if they match up with the new strategy delivered with much fanfare in a rare Pentagon appearance by the president last month. You can see those details here: http://1.usa.gov/zVzCjT

ANALYST TODD HARRISON of the Center for Strategic and Budget Assessments said those details were most remarkable for what they didn’t include, such as the Navy’s decision to keep all 11 of its carriers at the expense of submarine construction, and relatively shallow cuts to the nuclear triad.

BUT WHAT WAS MOST REMARKABLE was the relative equal share of cuts among the services, which is likely to prompt the most questions about whether the administration’s budget plans square with its strategic ones. There was a broad expectation that the Navy and Air Force would be bolstered at the expense of the Army to meet with the strategy’s new focus on Asia and the western Pacific. Harrison’s analysis is here: http://bit.ly/zBNO9r

VILLAGERS IN CENTRAL AFRICA have welcomed the presence of 100 USSOCOM troops dispatched to put an end to the Lord’s Resistance Army’s violent hold on them, McClatchy reports today. The deployment might also signal tighter cooperation between the U.S. and Ugandan militaries, which have a common interest in fighting Islamist rebels with links to Al Qaeda. “We asked God to save us and the Americans came,” said Bassiri Moke, a local chief. “We hope we won’t have to die like before.” Read the story here: http://bit.ly/wfSaYq

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