by\u00a0Mattea Kramer<\/a> Washington is pushing the panic button, claiming austerity is hollowing out our armed forces and our national security is at risk. That was the message Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel delivered last week when he announced that the Army would shrink to levels not seen since before World War II.Headlines<\/a>\u00a0about this crisis followed in papers like the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0and members of Congress issued statements swearing that they would never allow our security to be held hostage to the budget-cutting process.<\/p>\n Yet a careful look at budget figures for the U.S. military — a bureaucratic juggernaut accounting for\u00a057%<\/a>\u00a0of the federal discretionary budget and nearly40%<\/a>\u00a0of all military spending on this planet — shows that such claims have been largely fictional. Despite cries of\u00a0doom<\/a>\u00a0since the across-the-board cuts known as sequestration surfaced in Washington in 2011, the Pentagon has seen few actual reductions, and there is no indication that will change any time soon.<\/p>\n This piece of potentially explosive news has, however, gone missing in action — and the \u201cnews\u201d that replaced it could prove to be one of the great bait-and-switch stories of our time.<\/p>\n The Pentagon Cries Wolf, Round One<\/strong><\/p>\n As sequestration first approached, the Pentagon issued deafening cries of despair. Looming cuts would \u201cinflict lasting damage on our national defense and hurt the very men and women who protect this country,\u201d\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0Secretary Hagel in December 2012.<\/p>\n Sequestration went into effect in March 2013 and was slated to slice\u00a0$54.6 billion<\/a>\u00a0from the Pentagon\u2019s\u00a0$550 billion<\/a>\u00a0larger-than-the-economy-of-Sweden budget. But Congress didn\u2019t have the stomach for it, so lawmakers knocked the cuts down to\u00a0$37 billion<\/a>. (Domestic programs like Head Start and cancer research received no such\u00a0special dispensation<\/a>.)<\/p>\n By law, the cuts were to be applied across the board. But that, too, didn\u2019t go as planned. The Pentagon was able to do something hardly recognizable as a cut at all. Having the luxury of\u00a0<\/strong>unspent funds from previous budgets<\/a>\u00a0— known obscurely as \u201cprior year unobligated balances\u201d — officials reallocated some of the cuts to those funds instead.<\/p>\n In the end, the Pentagon shaved about\u00a05.7%<\/a>, or $31 billion, from its 2013 budget. And just how painful did that turn out to be? Frank Kendall, who serves as the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, has\u00a0acknowledged<\/a>\u00a0that the Pentagon \u201ccried wolf.\u201d Those cuts caused no substantial damage, he admitted.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s not where the story ends — it\u2019s where it begins.<\/p>\n Sequestration, the Phony Budget War, Round Two<\/strong><\/p>\n A $54.6 billion slice was supposed to come out of the Pentagon budget in 2014. If that had actually happened, it would have amounted to\u00a0around 10%<\/a>\u00a0of its budget. But after the hubbub over the supposedly devastating cuts of 2013, lawmakers set about softening the blow.<\/p>\n And this time they did a much better job.<\/p>\n In December 2013, a\u00a0budget deal<\/a>\u00a0was brokered by Republican Congressman Paul Ryan and Democratic Senator Patty Murray.\u00a0 In it they agreed to reduce sequestration. Cuts for the Pentagon soon shrank to $34 billion for 2014.<\/p>\n And that was just a start.<\/p>\n All the cuts discussed so far pertain to what\u2019s called the Pentagon\u2019s \u201cbase\u201d budget — its regular peacetime budget. That, however, doesn\u2019t represent all of its funding.\u00a0 It gets a\u00a0whole different budget<\/a>\u00a0for making war, and for the 13th year, the U.S. is making war in Afghanistan. For that part of the budget, which falls into the Washington category of \u201cOverseas Contingency Operations\u201d (OCO), the Pentagon is getting an additional\u00a0$85 billion<\/a>\u00a0in 2014.<\/p>\n And this is where something funny happens.<\/p>\n That war funding isn\u2019t subject to caps or cuts or any restrictions at all. So imagine for a moment that you\u2019re an official at the Pentagon — or the White House — and you\u2019re committed to sparing the military from downsizing. Your budget has two parts: one that\u2019s subject to caps and cuts, and one that isn\u2019t. What do you do? When you hit a ceiling in the former, you stuff extra cash into the latter.<\/p>\n It takes a fine-toothed comb to discover how this is done. Todd Harrison, senior fellow for defense studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, found that the Pentagon was stashing an\u00a0estimated extra $20 billion<\/a>\u00a0worth of non-war funding in the \u201coperation and maintenance\u201d accounts of its proposed 2014\u00a0war budget<\/a>. And since all federal agencies work in concert with the White House to craft their budget proposals, it\u2019s safe to say that the Obama administration was in on the game.<\/p>\n Add the December budget deal to this $20 billion switcheroo and the sequester cuts for 2014 were now down to $14 billion, hardly a devastating sum given the roughly\u00a0$550 billion<\/a>\u00a0in previously projected funding.<\/p>\n And the story\u2019s still not over.<\/p>\n When it was time to write the Pentagon budget into law, appropriators in Congress wanted in on the fun. As Winslow Wheeler of the Project on Government Oversight\u00a0discovered<\/a>, lawmakers added a $10.8 billion slush fund to the war budget.<\/p>\n All told, that leaves $3.4 billion — a cut of\u00a0less than 1%<\/a>\u00a0from Pentagon fundingthis year<\/a>. It\u2019s hard to imagine that anyone in the sprawling bureaucracy of the Defense Department will even notice. Nonetheless, last week Secretary Hagelinsisted<\/a>\u00a0that \u201c[s]equestration requires cuts so deep, so abrupt, so quickly that… the only way to implement [them] is to sharply reduce spending on our readiness and modernization, which would almost certainly result in a hollow force.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet this less than 1% cut comes from a budget that, at last count, was\u00a0the size of<\/a>\u00a0the next 10 largest military budgets on the planet combined. If you can find a threat to our national security in this story, your sleuthing powers are greater than mine. Meanwhile, in the non-military part of the budget, sequestration has brought\u00a0cuts that actually matter<\/a>\u00a0to everything from public education to the justice system.<\/p>\n Cashing in on the \u201cCuts,\u201d Round Three and Beyond<\/strong><\/p>\n After two years of uproar over mostly phantom cuts, 2015 isn\u2019t likely to bring austerity to the Pentagon either. Last December\u2019s budget deal already reduced the cuts projected for 2015, and President Obama is now\u00a0asking for<\/a>\u00a0something he\u2019s calling the \u201cOpportunity, Growth, and Security Initiative.\u201d It would deliver an extra\u00a0$26 billion<\/a>\u00a0to the Pentagon next year. And that still leaves the war budget for officials to use as a cash cow.<\/p>\n And the president is proposing significant growth in military spending further down the road. In his 2015 budget plan, he\u2019s asking Congress to approve an additional\u00a0$115 billion<\/a>\u00a0in extra Pentagon funds for the years 2016-2019.<\/p>\n My guess is he\u2019ll claim that our national security requires it after the years of austerity.<\/p>\n Mattea Kramer is a\u00a0<\/em>TomDispatch regular<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and Research Director at\u00a0<\/em>National Priorities Project<\/em><\/a>, which is a 2014\u00a0nominee<\/a>\u00a0for the Nobel Peace Prize.\u00a0 She is also the lead author of the book\u00a0A People’s Guide to the Federal Budget<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Or How the U.S. Military Avoided Budget Cuts, Lied About Doing So, Then Asked for Billions More by\u00a0Mattea Kramer click here for original article Washington is pushing the panic button, claiming austerity is hollowing out our armed forces and our national security is at risk. That was the message Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel delivered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2925,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/jonessoldiers.jpg?fit=140%2C250&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2924"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2927,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2924\/revisions\/2927"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nclick here for original article<\/a><\/p>\n