Responding to The One’s latest budget proposal, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) commented from the House floor, “[W]hen I look at the president’s budget for fiscal year 2011 [FY11], I think about what Albert Einstein said one time. He said that ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result’ is the very definition of insanity.” Congressman Pence went on to note how Obama’s budget fits squarely within that definition, including the defense portion of that budget.
While Department of Defense (DoD) and administration staff juggle numbers at the fringes — witness the ongoing discussions over canceling the C17 Globemaster III production line and killing an alternative engine for the F-35 Lightning II — the reality is that both DoD and the administration are happy to continue the status quo.
The evidence? Despite the rhetoric-du-jour, the rubber meets the road with dollars, and notwithstanding pervasive hope ‘n’ change speechifying, virtually nothing has changed with respect to the U.S. defense budget. In this budget submission, for example, military outlays remain virtually unchanged, save a slight increase (less than two percent) over inflation.
Also, the president apparently has included supplemental budget items as an integral part of his FY11 proposal. Translation: The commercial sector’s interfacing with DoD might actually be able to depend on the budget for once rather than having to wait for end-of-year fallout money or congressional plus-ups to end the year in the black. That predictability should mean lower overall costs, rendering savings for national defense.
On the down side, however, we note that neither a new National Security Strategy (NSS) nor National Military Strategy (NMS) — the key “vision” pieces to national security — has been published since 2006. This demonstrates that despite all the hype about “change,” at least with respect to defense, not much is different — save, perhaps, a burning (dare we say, “flaming”) desire to appease the far left by eliminating DoD’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Therein lies the rub: We have no real vision for tomorrow’s defense, but we face very real military budget tradeoffs today.
Budgets involve choices. What should we buy? What programs should we kill? What should we merely sustain? But these types of questions can’t be answered cogently without an overarching set of objectives. For national defense, those objectives should be articulated in both the NSS and the NMS.
The real issue for the president is determining our focus with respect to national security. Is it fighting a peer/near-peer nation? Is it conducting so-called “overseas contingency operations”? Is it some combination of both? Or is it something else? Unfortunately, the vehicle that should have answered these questions — the Quadrennial Defense Review — has become little more than a political football and/or shill for the service-of-the-hour. What is needed is an objective, disinterested look at the nation’s true national security requirements from an outsider’s perspective. Ultimately, this will lead to rational decision-making when it comes time to draft a viable national defense budget.
Fortunately, the president isn’t cutting the military to the bone, but this fact stands in contrast to the Left’s objectives, so expect considerable push-back on this portion when the budget arrives on House and Senate floors for review.
Barack Obama’s 2011 NASA budget will effectively terminate America’s manned space flight program, leaving space exploration leadership to the Chinese and the Russians. Read more here.
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Oh, and the impostor in chief showed his true feelings about respecting the military…
At the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday, the commander in chief not only got a sailor’s name wrong, but couldn’t figure out how to pronounce “corpsman.” Yes, he said “corpse-man.”
Watch the video.
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