Despite the need to move men and material by air into theaters like Afghanistan, the Obama Administration sought to end production of our C-17s, the work horse of our ability to project long range power. Despite the Air Force saying it would increase future risk, the Obama Administration successfully sought to end F-22 production – at a time when both Russia and China are acquiring large numbers of next generation fighter aircraft. It strikes me as odd that Defense Secretary Gates is the only member of the Cabinet to be tasked with tightening his belt.

The canceling of the F-22 was a minority position within the GOP, but it was supported by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), and it’s tough to find actual defense experts who disagree.

What he didn’t do was cite a single specific cut he’ll make in any specific weapons system. Somehow he’s identified “$40 billion in savings” — a number that’s gone around a lot for the past month — without explaining where it comes from. That begs the question of whether the forthcoming fleshed-out defense budget will delineate those specifics in cuts to actual defense programs or whether the explanation will come in September, when the Office of Management and Budget and the Pentagon release their new guidelines for future government contracting. Are we talking about $40 billion in cuts to programs or in cuts to projected spending?

DOD officials intend to cut procurement in the FY-10 budget by 2 percent or 3 percent, according to Kevin Scheid, the Pentagon’s deputy comptroller. However, more substantial programmatic cuts or adds will be influenced by the Quadrennial Defense Review and implemented beginning with the FY-11 request, due to Congress in February 2010.

“The administration will make . . . a partial statement with the FY-10 [budget's] details, but the full statement will be really communicated in the FY-11” budget, Scheid said today during a presentation at an Aviation Week-sponsored conference in Washington.

The procurement budget last year was about $104 billion. Three percent of that is around $3 billion. Change we can believe in!

Snark aside, the challenge now shifts over to the Quadrennial Defense Review. To recall Tony Cordesman’s plea for coordination between budgets and strategy, it makes sense to defer major budgetary choices until a major strategy review is completed. But it’s fair to say that ever since it was established in the 1990s, the QDR process represents hedged bets about what the future of the U.S. defense posture looks like — meaning they contain something for everyone (tech-heavy weaponry; irregular warfare; sea-based threats, etc) and rarely if ever recommend sharp cuts in favored programs. Could this one really be any different? Scheid:

The FY-11 budget will contain “major muscle movements” both “positive and negative” and influenced by the QDR, he said. At the same time, the FY-10 budget request — which is expected to be unveiled the week of April 20 — will not include outyear numbers because QDR work is just beginning. Gates has accelerated the Pentagon’s QDR build.

This would seem to give the defense lobby time to regroup, though.

It was Democrats who stuffed an estimated $524 million in defense earmarks that the Pentagon did not request into the 2008 appropriations bill, about $220 million more than Republicans did, according to an independent estimate. Of the 44 senators who implored Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in January to build more F-22 Raptors — a fighter conceived during the Cold War that senior Pentagon officials say is not suited to probable 21st-century conflicts — most were Democrats.

There are few true certainties in this world, but one that comes close is that the defense lobby is going to pour a ton of money into Democratic and liberal members of Congress in order to stanch the anticipated bleeding from President Obama’s prospective procurement and acquisition reforms.

The piece points out how a key ally for a bunch of dubious programs — the F-22 fighter jet, the DDG-1000 destroyer — is Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), the liberal icon who sits on the Armed Services Committee. Now would definitely be the time to watch which Democrats are taking defense industry money.

Counting Spratt — whom The Washington Times calls House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “centrist counterweight” — and the think tank of the Democratic Leadership Council as “progressives” is like discovering a hotbed of conservativism at an Arlen Specter speech to the Concord Coalition, but I digress.

Goldfarb’s bit of ideological invective would have more bite if some longtime Republican senator hadn’t introduced a bill today designed to rein in weapons procurement costs. Or if certain Bush administration-holdover defense secretaries didn’t publicly recognize that “this department faces difficult choices among competing priorities and programs.” Commentary like this makes it really hard to understand why Sen. John McCain lost the election.

A joint press release claims their bill will address “unreasonable cost and schedule estimates, unrealistic performance expectations, immature technologies, and repeated program changes that have led to explosive cost growth and costly schedule delays on so many of our major defense acquisition programs.” And a pool report from yesterday’s White House-Congressional fiscal responsibility summit quotes Levin as saying that the bill will require “will require defense contracts to be reexamined if its cost increase more than 25 percent over its initial estimate.” (sic)

Sounds promising, but one wonders how much teeth the bill will have. “Reexamining” a contract once it overruns its cost by a quarter doesn’t sound like an onerous disincentive for a defense contractor to control program costs. This fiscal year’s defense budget put up something like $104.2 billion for procurement. (If you click the link, you’ll see that the analysis I’m citing was penned by Steve Kosiak, who now oversees defense at the White House Office of Management and Budget.) Assume for the sake of argument that the fiscal 2010 defense budget hits the $537 billion cap, procurement stays level from 2009 and every procurement program projects an overrun. That’s still about a fifth of the defense budget — actually, less than a sixth when including the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. And, again, what actually happens when the “reexamination” bell gets rung?

I’d like to ask Levin and McCain those questions. Unfortunately, the briefing is in the Capitol building and The Washington Independent is currently in the application process for credentials from the Senate Periodical Gallery — and I missed my opportunity to get a day pass to attend the presser –  so alas.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) first asked whether there were “shovel ready” defense projects that should be included in the stimulus, “things we have to spend money on anyway.” Gates replied that he had submitted some thoughts to the White House after President Obama solicited them from him. These would be projects like constructing or renovating “military hospitals, clinics, barracks and childcare centers,” Gates said.

It wasn’t really enough for Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.). Chambliss brought up the Air Force’s notoriously wasteful F-22 Raptor fighter jet, “just as an example” — charitable of him! — and said that “if we shut down that line, we’re talking about a loss of 95,000 jobs.” (Lockheed Martin, manufacturer of the F-22, has a facility in Marietta, Ga., that assembles the jet’s forward fusillage.) He argued that “if we truly want to stimulate the economy, there’s no better place to do that than defense spending.” So much for health care, green jobs, infrastructure, etc.

Gates was pretty noncommittal. The facilities-construction jobs were the ones he emphasized in terms of stimulus-related defense spending. But when the defense budget comes forward in April, this is definitely something to look out for.

While the $700-billion bailout made headlines for weeks, this bill, which increased funding for programs opposed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, including F-22 fighter planes, received little attention. But it’s certainly worth a look.

And speaking of huge government expenditures you haven’t noticed, skip on over to Charles Morris’ piece on the Fed’s $1.6-trillion gamble, which has received a lot of attention today after being inexplicably picked up by ESPN.com under a piece about the Tennessee Titans.

F-22 Raptors (Flickr: James Gordon)

The House Financial Services Committee, on Sept. 24, grilled Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson Jr. about the $700-billion financial bailout plan. The high-profile hearing signaled that lawmakers were not going to pass just any rescue bill before recessing to campaign.

But that same day, the House passed a bill almost as big — a $629-billion package titled the Consolidated Security Disaster Assistance and Continuing Appropriations Act of 2009. The legislation includes the Pentagon budget for next year.

The tab came to $488 billion — not including funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Passing bills with little fanfare, including enormous defense budgets, is nothing new for Congress. But this defense appropriations bill is remarkable in a number of ways.

First, it never went through the appropriations committees in the House and Senate. Instead, the legislation was tacked on to the larger continuing appropriations bill a day before the House approved it. The bill is also remarkable because it increases funding for programs, like the F-22 fighter plane, that have been repeatedly criticized by Defense Sec. Robert Gates.

Gates and lawmakers from both parties have said Pentagon spending should be revamped. But that will likely have to wait at least another year.

“The legislative process was devoid of any reform,” said Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information, a non-partisan defense policy group. “To not even have a debate in the House or Senate was a cheapening of the process.”

Each year, Congress must pass 12 spending bills before Sept. 30 to keep the government running. As the Sept. 30 deadline approached, congressional leaders said they would only focus on the spending bills for the Dept. of Homeland Security, Veterans’ Affairs and the Pentagon.  Money for the other nine bills would be part of a continuing appropriations act that would keep spending at current levels until March 2009.

But only the Veterans’ Affairs bill was debated in either chamber. So as part of the continuing appropriations act, the House added on that VA bill and also a Dept. of Homeland Security spending bill introduced last year.

Rep. John Murtha (Flickr: Matthew Bradley)

As the continuing appropriations act was about to hit the House floor, the top-ranking heads of the the House defense appropriations subcommittee, Reps. John Murtha (D-Pa.) and Bill Young (R-Fla.), hashed out a defense-spending bill. The legislation was not debated and voted on by the full appropriations committee but went straight to the House floor.

The continuing appropriations act sailed through the House, 370-58. Three days later, it cleared the Senate, 78-12.

The bill then bypassed the usual next step of being the subject of a conference report between the House and Senate because Murtha and Young had already struck a compromise with their counterparts in the Senate, Sens. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) and Ted Stevens (R-Alaska).

“I’ve never, ever seen a case where the entire defense spending bill was voted on and passed largely unseen by Congress and not at least go through a committee,” said Steve Ellis, a spokesman for Taxpayers for Common Sense. “It was made available to Congress at 11 p.m. Tuesday; and was voted on Wednesday afternoon the next day.”

In response, Matthew Mozankey, a Murtha spokesman, said in an email that, “Of course we would have liked to have gone through the process. But that wasn’t how it worked out.”

Mozankey disputed the idea that the bill was “done overnight,” noting that the appropriations subcommittee discussed it in August and also consulted with the Senate.

President George W. Bush signed the continuing appropriations act, which boosts defense spending by 6.2 percent, on Sept. 30. But more remarkable than the overall $488 billion price tag is the money the legislation channels to future combat systems, missile defense and the F-22.

Both Republicans and Democrats criticized these programs during congressional hearings, and the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ auditing arm, unfavorably evaluated them.

But their most prominent critic has been Gates, who reportedly may be in the next administration’s Cabinet.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (WDCpix)

In numerous speeches and testimony before Congress, Gates has criticized the Pentagon as having “next-war-itis”– focusing on hypothetical future enemies instead of the current asymmetrical, insurgent threats in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“In a world of finite knowledge and limited resources, where we have to make choices and set priorities,” Gates said in May at the conservative Heritage Foundation, “it makes sense to lean toward the most likely and lethal scenarios for our military. And it is hard to conceive of any country confronting the United States in conventional terms.”

In that speech, Gates specifically cited the costs and delays of future combat systems, an elaborate, oft-criticized plan to remake the Army through robotic and vehicle systems. But future combat systems got $26 million more in this year’s spending bill than the $3.6 billion requested by the Bush administration.

“Future Combat Systems marches on undisturbed,” said Wheeler, of the Center for Defense Information.

Perhaps no weapons systems has been as scrutinized aqs the F-22 fighter plane, first devised near the end of the Cold War to counter what some in the military saw as Soviet aircraft superiority. The first F-22, however, was not built until 2003, and Gates has questioned building more than the 183 planes already scheduled.

“We’re fighting two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Gates said at a February Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. “And the F-22 has not performed a single mission in either theater.”

But in this new bill the F-22 program got $523 million more than the $2.9 billion that the Bush administration wanted. “The subcommittee is looking at future threats,”  Mozonkey said in an email, “not only our ability to respond, but our ability to deter and prevent war.”

Murtha has also recently cited the conflict between Russia and Georgia as a reason to keep making weapons for the next war.

Mike Dunn, president and CEO of the nonprofit Air Force Assn., also evoked that conflict in defending the F-22. “If the president says, ’set up a no-fly zone in Georgia,’ you need a F-22 to do that,” Dunn said.

But appeasing constituents with ties to the defense industry may have something to do with the F-22 spending increase. The plane is made by Lockheed Martin, as well as Pratt & Whitney, in Connecticut and Georgia. And Connecticut Rep. Rose DeLauro (D-Conn.) and two congressman from Georgia, Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Ga.) and Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.), were among the group of lawmakers that earmarked the extra F-22 money.

Funding for missile defense, another Cold War weapons system, dropped by about $200 million, from $8.9 billion $8.7 billion. But congressional earmarks for additional missile-defense projects totaled around $98 million. For example, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and Rep. Roy Blunt (D-Mo.) got $28 million for a short-range ballistic missile defense program called “David’s sling.”

The spending increases come as major defense contractors brace for cuts.  Last week, Boeing CEO Jim McNerny wrote to employees that there will be “some measure of impact” from the bailout of the financial system on weapons procurement.

On the other hand, advocates for greater defense spending point out that what they asked for — and Congress and the president have provided — no longer seems as expensive when compared to the cost of bailing out the financial system.

“The government spent $1.3 trillion on Fannie [Mae], Freddie [Mac], a stimulus package that didn’t work and a big bailout,” said Dunn. “We’re just asking for a few billion to replace airplanes.”