“I’ve spent my entire life watching government spend more money than it takes in. My entire life I’ve believed this to to be unsustainable,” Johnson said during an interview with The Iowa Independent at a coffee shop in Ames. “I think we’re here, I think we’re here right now. I think we’re on the verge of an imminent financial collapse unless we fix government spending.”

Johnson has been traveling the country with Our America Initiative, a 501(c)4 nonprofit political advocacy committee, spreading that message. He’s made stops in Iowa before, and stirred media speculation about a possible presidential run in 2012. Because of his nonprofit status, however, he refuses to give any clues, other than he wants to speak in Iowa to at least influence the debate when caucus time comes.

Fred Thompson had some legal issues during his campaign for crossing the line over his nonprofit status, Johnson said, “and I hope the fact that he was a 501(c)4 isn’t a portend for how successful this might be.”

His first trial run may come this weekend when he speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, and has his name included in the straw poll.

But even if he’s not running for office, at least not yet, he already has a plan for how to trim the deficit, starting with entitlement programs and national defense.

“We’re nation building all over the planet when we have our own nation to build,” Johnson said.

Johnson initially thought the invasion of Afghanistan was totally warranted, with America sending the military to take out Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda. But they’re not there anymore, he said.

“I would get out Iraq and Afghanistan tomorrow believing that the issues we will face getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan tomorrow will be the same issues that we’ll face 25 years from now, if that’s when we finally decide to get out,” Johnson said. “Worst of all, more service men and women will lose their lives.”

Beyond the Middle East, Johnson says he’s confounded on why the U.S. still has troops in Europe.

“I can’t find anyone who thinks that’s warranted,” he said.

Johnson explained the U.S. is spending 52 cents out of the worldwide dollar on military spending, while China is spending 9 cents of that dollar.

“If we reduce our expenditures to where we’re spending 29 cents of the dollar,” Johnson said, “it’d still be triple of what China’s spending.”

If Johnson does run for the 2012 GOP nomination, he would enter the race with similar platform stances as U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) did in 2008.

The libertarian leaning Paul was the only Republican advocating immediate draw downs of military operations in the Middle East and trimming national defense. And Paul finished ahead of higher-profile candidates like Giuliani and Thompson, and he gained more votes than Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and John McCain in a primary at least once. He also built the grassroots “Ron Paul Revolution,” laying out a lot of policy stances adopted by tea party groups.

Johnson doesn’t buy the theory that less money means the country is less secure.

“I don’t necessarily agree that by cutting money that we can’t in fact be smart and that we can’t in fact retain a really strong national defense,” Johnson said. “But a national defense as opposed to what seems to be a very strong offense.”

Tackling entitlements

The former New Mexico governor also has his eyes on tackling Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Johnson suggested raising the retirement age and raising the income threshold subject to social security tax.

“A reduction perhaps of some benefits, not big here, just a slight reduction if you will,” he said. “And perhaps a means testing for all of that.”

He said Medicaid and Medicare should be “block granted” — giving states a block grant without mandates from the federal government about how to issue it.

Johnson is perhaps best known for his outspoken advocacy for legalizing marijuana and ending the war on drugs. This is atypical for a Republican, ever since Richard Nixon started the war on drugs, and Ronald Reagan ramped up the effort. And although the Iowa Democratic Party has the idea of decriminalizing marijuana in their party platform, few politicians, if any, seek action on the issue.

During the recession, debate began in some states to legalize and tax marijuana to boost government revenues.

“A to Z, I’m opposed to the drug war, A through Z,” Johnson explained. “Taxes would be part of it, yeah, that’s the T. [And we could] redirect the resources to real crime, as opposed to an arguably victimless crime.”

Like Paul and the tea party crowd, Johnson advocates scrapping entire departments to save the federal government money, such as the Department of Education.

It’s clear Johnson believes if he ran he’d have a chance at success. He points to the fact he was elected, then re-elected in New Mexico, where it’s a two-to-one ratio Democrats to Republicans.

“I’m a Republican, I remain a Republican,” he said. “But I’m flattered by statements that would say these are libertarian ideas. Libertarians don’t get elected to office and I got elected to office. And I’m saying this in the context that these ideas resonate with people when they’re actually implemented.”

Johnson said his experience as governor was built around a cost-benefit analysis for everything. It lead him to oppose the death penalty, not only because mistakes are sometimes made, but because with court proceedings for appeals it’s cheaper to lock someone up for life than to put them to death. He also privatized prisons in New Mexico.

He’s spoken to more than 400 groups in 32 states, including four trips to Iowa. Shortly after the interview in Ames, he left to speak with a tea party group in Mason City. He rode RAGRAI in 2010 and said he plans to ride it again this summer.

When asked about the reception he’s gotten, Johnson said it’s been really good, and if it wasn’t he wouldn’t be here right now.

Gov. Gary Johnson (R-N.M.) on deficit reduction: “Let’s start with the big four” by TylerKingkade

Mr. Gates did not place a dollar figure on the total savings from the cutbacks, some of which are likely to be challenged by members of Congress intent on retaining jobs in their states and districts. But they appear to be Mr. Gates’s most concrete proposals to cut current spending as he tries to fend off calls from many Democrats for even deeper budget reductions, and they reflect his strategy of first trying to squeeze money out of the vast Pentagon bureaucracy.

While large headquarters have been combined and realigned over the years, Pentagon officials could not recall a time when a major command was shut down and vanished off the books, even though some jobs will probably be added elsewhere to carry on essential parts of the mission.

The Wall Street Journal estimates the cuts could save $100 billion over five years. I have no way of evaluating the impact of the actual cuts. But the strategy seems brilliant to me — and I would not be surprised to see other departments and agencies doing the same and cutting themselves before Washington does the cutting for them.

Fred Kaplan, at Slate, throws on some cold water, though, noting that Defense has a whole lot to cut and should anticipate further budgetary scrutiny going forward:

The steps Gates took today have far-reaching implications; I don’t mean to minimize them. But there are other issues and questions that tap more deeply into the foundations of what he himself calls our “cumbersome and top-heavy” military, which has “grown accustomed to operating with little consideration to cost.” For instance: How many submarines and aircraft carriers does the Navy really need? And do all those carriers need the same number of aircraft and escort ships? How many fighter planes does the Air Force really need? How many brigades does the Army really need?

Gates’ new reforms are based on two premises: First, that the nation can’t afford unceasing growth in the defense budget; second, that the nation can afford moderate growth in the defense budget, as long as the Pentagon shows good faith by slashing what any objective observer would label “waste.” The first premise is unassailable, the second probably too optimistic. The fact is, we can’t afford growth in the defense budget, period. To get the cuts he’s after, Gates — as a matter of political realism — has to leave the rest of the budget alone. But at some point, some secretary of defense is going to have to open it all up to scrutiny.

But undeterred by all that is a coalition of liberal and conservative defense wonks from the Project on Defense Alternatives, the Center for American Progress, the Cato Institute, Taxpayers for Common Sense, the Center for Defense Information and more. Calling themselves the Sustainable Defense Task Force — thereby taking up the “sustainability” call for budget austerity from Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his undersecretary for policy (and likely successor), Michele Flournoy — they identify up to $960 billion in spending cuts over ten years. That’s in a new report they’re releasing this morning.

The cuts don’t come from war spending, but from the Pentagon’s “base budget”: everything that the department buys or maintains on a regular basis, as opposed to a contingency basis for wartime emergency. Cuts are supposed to come across the board, from nuclear forces, missile defense and space programs (nearly $200 billion saved over ten years); big service priorities like the Joint Strike Fighter, the KC-X refueling tanker, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle and the Osprey helicopter (nearly $90 billion saved over ten years); getting rid of two Air Force tactical fighter wings and cutting the Navy to 230 ships (nearly $167 billion saved over ten years); reforming DOD’s increasingly expensive health care system (nearly $50 billion saved over ten years); and many, many other canceled, delayed or reformed programs. You can read the full (PDF) report here.

It would be an understatement to say that the cuts identified by the task force run against the ever-upward trajectory of the defense budget. But they also run up against certain priorities of the current Pentagon leadership, even as that leadership goes further than most in sharing the task force’s goals. The Joint Strike Fighter and KC-X are priorities. So is maintaining an expanded ground force. But the task force urges the Pentagon to roll back the growth in the Army and Marine Corps as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars end. And while several post-Cold War Pentagon leaders have argued for reducing the U.S.’s garrisoning footprint in Europe and Asia, another task force priority, the diplomatic equities at stake have proven to be a powerful inertial force. And then there’s the fact that the House is thumbing its nose at Gates’s efforts just to get rid of an engine that the services say they don’t want in the Joint Strike Fighter.

But it’s one thing to propose specific costs to specific programs. It’s another to offer a set of criteria to identify wasteful spending going forward. That gets into the issues of national strategy that Flournoy discussed in her speech yesterday to the Center for a New American Security. And the task force is happy to oblige, urging policymakers to eschew:

Department of Defense programs that are based on unreliable or unproven technologies,

Missions that exhibit a poor cost-benefit payoff and capabilities that fail the test of cost-effectiveness or that possess a very limited utility,

Assets and capabilities that mismatch or substantially over-match current and emerging military challenges, and

Opportunities for providing needed capabilities and assets at lower cost via management reforms.

Now, it isn’t just increases to the base budget that account for that growth alone. It’s the ongoing expenses of Iraq and Afghanistan — which will end at some point; the Iraq deployment will end next year — and the miserable state of the economy. So we’ll have to see what this looks like going forward. But still — nearly five percent of GDP…

The gray bar is for combat funding — Iraq and Afghanistan together. Robert Hale, the Pentagon comptroller, told a press conference that starting next fiscal year, the Pentagon is presuming for budgeting purposes that the wars will cost $50 billion, thanks to the Iraq drawdown. So if that’s the case, then it’ll take a grand total of four more budgets for the Obama Pentagon budget to outspend the final two Bush budgets when the big big costs of sustaining the 2007-8 Iraq surge is factored into the equation. It may be unfair to Obama to compare base budget growth to base-budget-growth-plus-war funding, but that’s the only way for Congressional Republicans to actually argue that Obama is cutting defense — and you know that’s an inevitable line of criticism. So when they say that, you can refer to this chart and know that the only way that line of argument can possibly be true is for us to continue pouring money down the sinkhole of Iraq. Because any way you slice it, that blue baseline funding bar is rising and rising.

So for next year’s war request, Gates wants $159.3 billion. But that’s not all: for the “extended surge,” he wants a $33 billion supplemental to pay for the extra 30,000 troops. That’s technically part of this year’s budget request. “I will be asking the Congress to enact the supplemental by the spring,” Gates said.

That’s $741.2 billion to be spent on the Pentagon over the next year, if you’re counting. Compare that to last year’s total $663 billion request.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen (Oscar Matatquin/ZUMA Press)

President Obama announced in his State of the Union address that national security programs would not be subject to his proposed spending freeze. But that hasn’t stopped Pentagon officials from placing what they consider to be outdated military programs in the budgetary icebox.

In its master planning document for the medium-term defense outlook, known as the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon will announce cuts to some Navy and Air Force programs. The Pentagon will not purchase any more of the costly C-17 transport aircraft for the Air Force. It will delay purchase of the Navy’s LCC command ship. It will cancel production of the Navy’s planned CG(X) cruiser. And it will contend that these steps and others are necessary for reorienting the U.S.’s defense posture around the wars the U.S. is fighting now and the threats it presently faces.

[Security1] According to a knowledgeable Defense official who requested anonymity, the cuts in the QDR will not be as extensive as the ones announced in last year’s Pentagon budget. Last spring, Defense Secretary Robert Gates ended several persistent, expensive and underutilized or unproven defense systems like the F-22 fighter jet and the Army’s Future Combat Systems vehicle, steps lauded by defense reformers and the subject of a tough but successful congressional fight. Those cuts “created the space for the QDR to focus on areas of reinvestment,” the Defense official told TWI.

The QDR is scheduled to be unveiled on Monday. Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, will testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday about both the QDR and the fiscal 2011 defense budget, the first budget guided by the new document. An early draft of the QDR that leaked to Defense News and InsideDefense on Wednesday did not identify the three systems as slated for cuts, and the Pentagon official said the final document will change substantially from the version that leaked.

Delaying production of the LCC and canceling the CG(X) would probably not “equal a big cost savings,” said Laicie Olson, a defense analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, since it is unclear how much replacing those systems with different ones would cost. But ending the C-17, manufactured by Boeing, would be a “huge cost saving,” she said, representing an estimated $2.5 billion — that is, if the administration can persuade Congress to stop authorizing the purchase of a plane that provides about 30,000 jobs in more than 40 states.

In any event, the budget request the Obama administration will send to Congress next week is expected to total $740 billion when factoring in the cost of sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, up from $663 billion last year. But when not factoring in the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon budget is expected to grow by 2 percent over last year, or about the rate of inflation.

Both the QDR and the anticipated cuts reflect the document’s reorientation of Pentagon thinking, planning and budgetary decisions toward immediate and manifested threats over the next four years — principally the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan, which the leaked draft anticipates continuing throughout the four-year life of the QDR — and away from remote or hypothetical ones. The 2010 document abandons a construct of its predecessors that instructs the military to prepare to fight two simultaneous conventional wars, the result of painful experience fighting two simultaneous unconventional wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that earlier QDRs did not envision.

Rather than instruct the military to prepare for particular conflicts against particular enemies, the 2010 QDR will instruct it instead to defend against demonstrated enemy capabilities and to support specific missions. Those missions include supporting civilian authorities, improving cyberspace capabilities and performing counterinsurgency, counterterrorism and stability operations — the first time a QDR has embraced these once-marginal functions as core Pentagon capabilities. It instructs the military to deter, counter and defeat weapons of mass destruction and “anti-access capabilities” possessed by adversaries, like missiles and cyber defenses that inhibit the U.S.’s ability to project its military power. And the document urges the military to increase its supply and use of remotely piloted vehicles like the drones used by the Air Force in Afghanistan.

“This QDR focuses on the wars we are actually fighting, not the wars we sometimes wished we were fighting,” the official said, adding that a “hypothetical calculus” like the abandoned two-wars concept that did not focus on specific capabilities had “done far more harm than good.”

In particular, the QDR instructs the military to counter “ballistic missiles, anti-satellite capabilities and other systems” that adversaries can use to deter the U.S., the Pentagon official previewed. While it does not call out particular enemies and focuses instead on the capabilities they might possess, “we argue that the proliferation of some of these things to non-state actors will also magnify the problem — think Hezbollah using anti-ship missiles in 2006” during its war with Israel, the official said.

The QDR also emphasizes that military forces require “seamless integration” with a “range of civilian and military partners,” both from within the civilian sectors of the U.S. government and across the international community. But Raymond Pritchett, one of the leading naval bloggers, said that delaying the LCC command ship, a platform that allows several militaries to network together aboard essentially a floating headquarters, appeared at odds with the broader approach. “The command ship is a big deal,” Pritchett said. “If your stated strategic direction is partnership with other countries, the last thing you want to do is get rid of a platform that brings all those capabilities together.” He worried that delaying the LCC indicated that “the Navy is disconnected from strategy.” But some contend that the Navy’s advanced communications infrastructure means the LCC is no longer required for the Navy to operate alongside partner militaries.

By contrast, Pritchett saw the cancellation of the CG(X) as an inevitability that will cause the Navy to redesign its cruisers and destroyers into a single ship class. “From the perspective of defense reform, it’s a good thing, standardized to one hull,” he said.

Whether Congress will accept the cuts is an open question. The C-17 transport plane has limited utility in a war like Afghanistan, since the plane is too big for most of the country’s available landing space, but the plane has a lot of legislative allies. “They’ve tried to cut the C-17 before, and it hasn’t worked. They can’t get the cut through Congress,” Olson said. “As far as delays, that’s usually easier to get through. But those 30,000 jobs are going to be a kicker.”

Similarly, the Pentagon is preparing for a struggle with the Hill and the press about the anticipated cuts — and the focus of the QDR itself. Emphasizing the need to counter threatening capabilities rather than specific enemies opens the administration up to the political argument that it is neglecting particular U.S. adversaries. Monday and Tuesday will be filled with extensive press briefings, think-tank lectures and congressional testimony from Gates, Mullen and Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, whose subordinates conducted the QDR process.

“We’ll take some hits for not having a bumper-sticker force planning construct, but screw it,” the Pentagon official said. “The world is complicated.”

And the draft suggests that Gates wasn’t playing around. Some bullet points:

The FY11 budget build on FY10, providing additional attention to key lines of investment that are highlighted in the reports

? Taking care of our troops and our people

? Reforming how we buy and operate

Rebalancing for:

? The current fight

? Plausible future challenges

Now, you can’t tell from that what will be cut. The defense budget is always a fight between the immediate challenges of the present and what each military service envisions as the future of war and its relevance to it. Gates has said, repeatedly — and conspicuously last year when he chopped a bunch of programs —  that he’s sick of buying stuff for every conceivable challenge, no matter how hypothetical. But we need to wait and see how that cashes out. The draft’s intro says:

QDR analyses centered on the following challenge areas: defending the United States and providing defense support to civil authorities, conducting irregular operations (including counterinsurgency, stability operations, and counter-terrorist operations), defeating adversaries armed with anti-access capabilities, countering weapons of mass destruction, and operating effectively in cyberspace.

That paragraph strongly suggests — as does Gates’ entire tenure, really — that the Pentagon ought to be reoriented around immediate, manifested challenges.  (I guess you could argue that the “anti-access capabilities” thing is the exception; my ignorant speculation is that’s in there so the South Koreans and Japanese don’t think we’re ignoring North Korea.) But here’s the thing: the services are really good at arguing that their existing priorities are applicable to new circumstances. That’s how the F-22, a Cold War-era fighter aircraft, survived until Gates killed it last year. So we’ll have to see how exactly the budget measures up to the QDR construct. Does it rebrand old wine or does it smash some corked bottles?

Luckily, Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, will give a speech on Tuesday, before Gates and Mullen testify, on the QDR.

“I can tell you there is no way the defense budget will be immune to budget reduction efforts,” Stan Collender, one of Washington’s most respected budget wallahs, said at CSBA’s annual budget briefing.

Yes, but the key word there is “efforts.”

The cheat-sheet paragraph:

[D]efense spending has risen to a historically high level, in real dollars. The [fiscal year] 2010 budget requested $534 billion in discretionary and $4 billion in mandatory funding for the base defense budget and an additional $130 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This exceeds the previous peak in total defense spending of $517 billion in Fy 1986, adjusting for inflation. However, defense spending as a percent of GDP is not at a historically high level because over the past several decades the overall economy has grown faster than defense spending. This suggests that the current level of defense spending, while high, remains affordable by historical standards. But given the state of the federal budget and the ongoing cost of the wars, it is unlikely the base defense budget will be able to maintain the rate of growth experienced over the past ten years.

Now, if you read through Harrison’s paper, you’ll see it contains a key assumption. Because defense spending is so bloated, and the deficit so big and the economy so bad, then obviously defense spending has to drop, so it makes sense to reprioritize what’s actually in the national interest. But that assumes political will — both from Congress and from the Obama administration — that is absolutely not in evidence. And it also assumes countervailing political pressures — i.e., the desire not to be demagogued as weak on defense — that are in abundance will suddenly abate. So we’re left with … an unsustainable defense budget and spending freezes/cuts in for more politically vulnerable clients, like the poor and middle class.