Do ask, do tell: we should be hearing more from GOP leaders on the issue of military spending

Ryan Streeter

Writing for the Daily Caller about Eric Cantor's comments this morning that defense spending cuts are "on the table," Chris Moody reports:

The GOP’s “Pledge to America” unveiled in September outlined a number of budget-cutting measures, but left defense untouched. While more than 50 members co-signed a letter in October that urged the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform to consider cutting the defense budget, only two Republican House members, Ron Paul of Texas and Walter Jones of North Carolina, put their names on the list.

Moody rightly points out in the article that GOP members who have resisted defense spending cuts might be in a bit of a bind as they try to respond to voter's wishes for spending reductions.

One might argue that events have now overtaken the Pledge. The voter sentiment that was channeled through the polls on November 2 likely wants bigger cuts than what the Pledge proposed. Nick Gillespie at Reason makes this very point and takes aim at military spending:

The only folks more hellbent on maintaining the military status quo than the president are the Republicans. Failed presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has already lashed out at freshman Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) for his supposed "isolationism" and readiness to entertain cuts in defense spending. McCain and other hawks will get ideological support from courtiers such as The New York Times' David Brooks, who has pulled out of mothballs his '90s-era call for a "national greatness conservatism" in which military might plays a starring role, and AEI scholars such as Danielle Pletka and Thomas Donnelly, who argued in the Washington Post that the GOP will become "a combination of Ebenezer Scrooge and George McGovern" if it cuts defense spending one farthing. That's inertia you can believe in. 

This is, I worry, going to be a growing line of thought over the next few months that could drive legislative decision-making whose consequences we don't understand. The public is starting to understand that reducing what we spend on entitlements, for instance, will have some palpable consequences. I don't think very many of us are even close to understanding what "cutting the military budget" means. No one should make any decisions on this until there has been an open public debate about the consequences.

Voters should ask their representatives what they plan to do, and congressional members should tell us where they stand. In order for this to happen, our representatives should be able to answer some questions:

• If you are open to cutting the defense budget, can you identify ways to do this without compromising the personnel levels, equipment necessary to protect our soldiers, and the modernization to keep them ahead of the bad guys?
• Do you know of areas in the defense budget where we are wasting taxpayer money on technology and equipment that is no longer needed?
• Do you think we can reform military medical and retirement benefits to curb spending which, as Kori Shake pointed out yesterday on Platform, has been spiraling upwards just as it has been in the private sector?

Until members can articulate answers to these questions, I don't see how anyone can say he or she supports reductions to defense spending.

Comments

[Not a Chicken-hawk]

Come home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Close overseas bases.

No more undeclared unconstitutional wars.

Stop propping up dictators and meddling in the internal affairs of other nations.

[Drake]

That way lies madness and a new Dark Age.

True, you can fund a nice comfortable national retirement on the proceeds of managing decline - as Britain found when it traded in its Empire for a Welfare State. It lasts for a generation or two but the end result isn't pretty. (Not to mention that the UK had the USA to hurl the torch to as it fell. After America, there's no one left).

[All of which is not to say that there isn't room for improvement in the WAY the Defense budget is spent, but its overall level is, if anything, too low].