For All the Rhetoric, the New Pentagon Budget is No Revolution in Defense Spending

Washington, Apr 6 (IPS) -- Secretary of Defense Robert Gates unveiled the U.S.'s much-anticipated new military budget Monday, which aims to reorient the armed forces toward irregular and counterinsurgency warfare while proposing cuts in several major weapons programs.

The budget is viewed as a major step in the ongoing debate within the U.S. military about whether to focus primarily on conventional warfare against other states or on counterinsurgency operations against non-state actors.

But it is also likely to engender pushback from lawmakers and defense- industry interests who are unhappy about cutbacks in lucrative weapons programs.

The changes proposed by the new budget -- while significant -- are far from marking a fundamental reshaping of the U.S. defense establishment, some defence analysts caution.

"They're calling it a fundamental shift and that's both true and false," said Miriam Pemberton, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. "It's true because their budget proposes the most ambitious set of cuts to well- entrenched weapons systems since the early 1990s."

"It's false, though, because this budget perpetuates the upward trajectory of defense spending, it's higher than any of the Bush budgets that preceded it, and it increases funding for some programs that I think are a mistake," Pemberton continued.

The $534 million budget for fiscal year 2010 -- which does not take into account the "emergency supplemental" appropriations that pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- marks a slight increase over the Bush administration's budget for the previous year.

However, the breakdown of this spending will be considerably different from previous years.

"These past few years have revealed underlying flaws in the priorities, cultural preferences and reward structures of America's defense establishment," Gates said. "There have been enough studies, enough hand-wringing, enough rhetoric. Now is the time for action."

Among the most notable cutbacks was the F-22 fighter program. Gates announced that the Pentagon would end production after buying four more fighters this year.

Rumors that Gates intended to kill the F-22 -- which was originally designed in the Cold War to counter Soviet air power -- led to a lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill and in the media to save the fighter. A highly-publicized March article in the Atlantic by best-selling author Mark Bowden, for example, warned that F-22 cutbacks would be "paid in the blood" of U.S. fighter pilots.

Other cutbacks include missile defense, which will see its budget reduced by $1.4 billion, and the Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) modernization program -- the vehicle component of which will be cancelled.

However, the budget retained or even accelerated other programs that were viewed as logical targets for cuts, such as the F-35 joint strike fighter. F-35 purchases will be more than doubled from 14 in 2009 to 30 in 2010.

"I would give the budget a B to B-minus," said William Hartung of the New America Foundation. "They did a little less than half of what I'd hope they'd do. But under Bush they would have done nothing or gone in the other direction."

If the budget cuts back on some high-profile conventional war programs, it compensates by dramatically increasing funding for some irregular operations and counterinsurgency programs.

Notably, Gates announced an additional $2 billion for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance -- including an additional 50 Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial drones. The budget also proposes a five percent expansion of Special Operations forces.

Defense analysts also caution that the budget is likely to face major resistance in Congress from lawmakers whose districts benefit from defense spending and who have been recipients of defense industry largesse.