Did you hear? President Obama is going to cut defense spending by 10%! At a time of war, this Democrat is going to cut the military budget! That's what Faux News has been saying. That's what Drudge and Limbaugh and the rest of them have been screaming; President Obama is going to cut the Department of Defense's budget by more than $55 billion! It doesn't take a genius to figure out that we can't jump on everything Fox News says as gospel. There's a reason for that; it's deliberate distortion.
Depending on how you are looking at it, President Obama is either cutting defense spending by 10% or he's giving it a hike. The funny thing is, Talking Points Memo knew that conservatives both in and outside of the Pentagon would go after President Obama on this back in November.
Well, we now know where these numbers can from. You see, the DOD budget for next year is going to be exactly what the Bush administration forecasted their 2010 budget to be. In other words, President Obama's administration is allocating the same amount to the DOD that former President Bush's administration felt would be needed for next year. The reason why this is being called a 10% cut in defense spending is because the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted a lot more. How much more? $57 billion more than what was given, which is $527 billion.
Let me repeat; the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted $584 billion in defense spending. This year, the budget is $513 billion. We're talking about a $71 billion bump that they wanted, rather than the $14 billion more that they'll get from the Obama administration. There's a $57 billion dollar difference here, which is where "he's going to cut more than $55 billion from defense" came from.
At any rate, I linked to an important article from TPM above. Let me just give you a sample, from Defense News;
The uniformed services are trying to lock in the next administration by creating a political cost for holding the line on defense spending. Conservative groups are hoping to ramp up defense spending as a tool to limit options for a Democratic Congress and president to pass new, and potentially costly, social programs, including health care reform.
They also like the idea of creating an unrealistically high baseline of expectations for defense spending that will allow them to claim President Obama has cut defense spending. ...
That was from mid-November. Is there anything that you'd like to add?