By Marina Malenic
The Obama administration should cancel or scale back several major Defense Department acquisition programs in order to offset the cost of the additional 30,000 troops it plans to send to Afghanistan, according to a left-leaning think tank.
“We feel this would be a step in the right direction to begin dealing with the cost of these wars, which now have exceeded about one trillion dollars and have added immensely to our deficit problems,” Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Lawrence Korb told reporters during a teleconference yesterday.
“You’ve got to stop getting these things on a credit card,” Korb added.
President Barack Obama earlier this month announced plans to deploy 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan is estimated to cost approximately $30 billion beyond the $65 billion already budgeted for the Afghan conflict this year.
The Center for American Progress yesterday released a report calling on Obama to cut defense programs not vital to national security. Some of the group’s recommendations include: cutting spending on ballistic missile defense; purchasing just one Virginia-Class submarine per year; buying only two DDG-1000 destroyers instead of three; ending production of the V-22 Osprey; slowing development and purchase of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter; and scaling back the number of U.S. nuclear forces.
“These are all programs that can be reduced or delayed without any impact on national security,” Korb said.
Michael Ettinger, the group’s Vice President for Economic Policy, noted that defense spending accounts for about one-fifth of the federal budget.
“We spend 4.3 percent of [Gross Domestic Product] on defense, which is more than any other advanced country by far,” Ettinger said. “If you add in what we’re spending on the supplementals, it’s more than the rest of the world combined.”
The two also criticized the practice of paying for wars via supplemental appropriations. The Bush administration funded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through supplementals. Because they are sent to Congress for review during the fiscal year, they are not subject to the same amount of congressional scrutiny as the regular defense budget.
The report applauds the Obama administration’s decision to submit funding for the wars at the same time as the fiscal year 2010 baseline defense budget.
“Yet this practice could quickly be reversed because President Obama has not explained how his administration will fund his troop increase in Afghanistan,” the report adds. “At the very least, the president and his administration must immediately begin the process of explaining to Congress and the American people how they intend to fund the most recent escalation.”
Lawmakers, meanwhile, have begun to discuss how to pay for the troop escalation absent such a plan. Rep, David Obey (D-WI), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, has called for a 1 percent “war surtax” to pay for the new deployments.