By Emelie Rutherford
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) praised Defense Secretary Robert Gates last week for showing “courage” by attempting to reduce weapon systems suited for a “bipolar world,” and also slammed a Republican senator who criticized Gates’ proposed cuts.
“The secretary of defense is more accurately reflecting the current state of play of what the threat is, what the mission is, and what the priorities should be in the budget,” Pelosi said during an April 8 interview aired on MSNBC‘s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann.”
“We’re no longer in a bipolar world, and some of the weapon systems are geared toward that; Now they won’t be,” the leader of House Democrats said. “I salute (Gates) for his courage in putting this forward.”
Gates announced April 6 he is recommending to the White House a slew of programmatic changes in the fiscal year 2010 defense budget to enhance capabilities to fight current threats while also hedging against other risks. Lawmakers have pushed back on Gates’ proposals including cutting the Missile Defense Agency by $1.4 billion, building no more than 187 F-22 fighter jets, and eliminating the vehicle portion of the Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) program.
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), a Senate Armed Services Committee member and FCS backer, said April 6 in a YouTube video from Afghanistan that the program cuts would “disarm America.”
“Here in Afghanistan, our brave troops continue to fight while their President guts our military,” Inhofe said in the widely viewed video.
Pelosi told Keith Olbermann that Inhofe’s video amounted to “desperation.”
“I really do think it’s desperation to a certain extent that a senator would criticize the president while…he, the senator, is on foreign soil,” Pelosi said, without naming Inhofe but referring to his comments aired from a military base. She said the budget is “fair game,” but that, “we can criticize at home on that.”
In an apparent reference to Republicans, Pelosi said: “If these weapon systems are so great, they should be able to defend them on the merit.”
“I always recall President Eisenhower warning of the military-industrial complex,” she said. “The power of the weapons manufacturers is very…powerful in Washington, D.C. And as I said, this took great courage.”
She added: “our first responsibility is to protect the American people,” and that she believes Gates has expressed the current budgetary needs in his proposal.
The White House, Senate, and House of Representatives have agreed to set the FY ’10 defense base budget at $533.7 billion, which reflects 2 percent in real growth over the FY ’09 appropriated level of $513 billion, after factoring for inflation. Gates and the White House have called for moving into the base defense budget some war funding–for items including the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization and end-strength increases for the Army and Marine Corps–previously covered in supplemental-spending bills.
Critics of funding the defense budget at $533.7 billion argue weapon systems are getting squeezed as the Pentagon grapples with rising health-care and personnel costs.
Gates’ defense-budget shakeup recommends increases as well as decreases to weapon programs. He told reporters on April 7 that going forward he doesn’t believe “the department can sustain the programs that we have with flat growth, and therefore I believe that we need at least 2 percent real growth going forward.”