Spencer Ackerman explained last week what Defense Secretary Robert Gates is actually doing:
Actually, despite what some breathless headlines say this morning, the changes that the defense secretary made to the Pentagon's ledger are fairly modest. That $78 billion figure? In context, it means that over the next five years, the Pentagon will spend $78 billion less than it projected it would. Non-war spending will remain in the ballpark of over half a trillion dollars; Gates said the budget for fiscal 2012 will be $553 billion.
What really happened is that Gates and the White House stopped increasing the military's cash. The following years' budgets will grow less steeply than they did in previous years — only between one and two percent higher — and by fiscal 2015, they'll flatline. In the past, Gates has talked about the military's financial “spigot” closing. Under this plan, the tap will flow at essentially the current rate — still more than President Bush's first post-9/11 Pentagon budgets. With inflation, you'll see the budgetary numbers grow somewhat over the next few years, but not significantly.
So defense spending is actually rising, and not just to keep place with inflation, just not as much as it would.
Calling this a "defense cut" is a bit bizarre. Think about it this way: If you were 300 pounds, and in the next year your doctor told you that you were on the road to gaining another hundred, but you instead only went up to 350 pounds, you wouldn't be walking around telling everyone about how you "lost weight."
