The two chairs of the Deficit Reduction Commission have floated their trial balloon.  Here’s my good news/ bad news quick take on their proposals for military spending:

Good news:

• Cutting military spending—the formerly untouchable component of the budget—is off-limits no more. Secretary Gates has been proposing “cuts” that are actually shaved, and redirected, increases.  What the Deficit Commission chairs are proposing is, actually, cuts.
• Military spending gets equal treatment!  It makes up half the discretionary budget (what Congress votes on every year).  The team of Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson propose cutting $100 billion from defense, and $100 billion from everything else.  Proportional, in other words.
• This includes $20 billion in weapons buys.  This would be the largest cut in this budget since the end of the cold war.  The list includes items that IPS’ Unified Security Budget task force, which I chair, and the Sustainable Defense Task Force, of which I am a member, have recommended, including ending, finally, the hybrid helicopter plane—the V-22 Osprey—that’s struggled to become airborne since the eighties, and that even Dick Cheney tried to kill; canceling the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle program; cutting in half buys of the Joint Strike Fighter plane, the most expensive weapons program EVER; and further cutting the grab bag of high-tech toys, the Future Combat Systems.
• They propose cutting 1/3 of our overseas bases, bringing home 150,000 of our troops in Europe and Asia, which IPS has also been advocating for years.  The savings they project from this are far smaller than our projections.

Bad news:

• They make no mention of savings to be gained from cuts to the nuclear weapons complex, for example, or to unneeded aircraft fighter wings, or submarines, or destroyers.
• They get to their $100 billion number by gesturing toward large quantities of unspecified “efficiencies.”
• While reassigning Defense Secretary Gates’ projected savings to the deficit is better than his plans to plow them back into his own budget, this money is sorely needed for job-creating investment.
• No sooner had the balloon been launched than other members of the Commission began taking pot shots at it.  Further deliberations, and the voting, are still to come.