Obama's Victory Over Military Lobby

If there's a lobby that's worse than the insurance companies, it's the military lobby. That's where our money really gets sucked up.

But as the president signed a $680 billion military policy bill on Wednesday, it was clear that he had succeeded in paring back nearly all of the programs and setting a tone of greater restraint than the Pentagon had seen in many years.

Now the question is whether Mr. Obama can sustain that push next year, when the midterm elections are likely to make Congress more resistant to further cuts and job losses.

White House officials say Mr. Obama took advantage of a rare political moment to break through one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies and trim more weapons systems than any president had in decades.

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said Wednesday that the plan was to threaten a veto over a prominent program — in this case, the F-22 fighter jet — “to show we were willing to expend political capital and could win on something that people thought we could not.”

Once the Senate voted in July to stop buying F-22s, Mr. Emanuel said in an interview, that success “reverberated down” to help sustain billions of dollars of cuts in Army modernization, missile defense and other programs.

Mr. Emanuel said the strategy emerged when the defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, told Mr. Obama they needed to “shake up sacred cows and be seen as taking on fights.” More at NYT

Obama Signs National Defense Authorization Act

Obama signs the $680 billion budget for fiscal 2010, which funds conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Given the budget, some smart person could probably figure out how many troops Obama is considering sending to Afghanistan.
The hate crimes amendment that Obama also signed into law today was part of the defense bill.

Transcript

Gates: Pleasantly Surprised With NATO Summit

Today, defense secretary Robert Gates outlined the defense budget.
Some people are going to begin complaining wildly about the cuts, he said. But Gates said he drew up the budget without considering politics of who would get mad at which cuts. He said he did what he thought was right for the country.
He also said he's canceling the presidential helicopter project and coming up with a new copter program.
During the Q&A portion (not in the video below), he called the NATO summit a significant achievement because European countries pledged troops and trainers for Afghanistan.

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NYT: The decisions represent the first sweeping overhaul of American military strategy under the Obama administration, which wants to spend more money on counterterrorism and less on preparations for conventional warfare against large nations like China and Russia.

Mr. Gates announced cuts in missile defense programs, in the Army’s expensive Future Combat Systems and in Navy shipbuilding operations.

But he proposed, as he has before, spending an extra $11 billion to finish enlarging the Army and the Marine Corps and to halt reductions in the Air Force and the Navy. He also announced an extra $2 billion for intelligence and surveillance equipment, including more spending on special forcers units and new Predator and Reaper drones, the unmanned vehicles that are currently used in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq for strikes against militants.

More broadly, Mr. Gates signaled that he hopes to impose a new culture on the Pentagon, particularly the way it chooses and buys weapons.

“The perennial procurement and contracting cycle, going back many decades, of adding layer and layer of cost and complexity onto fewer and fewer platforms that take longer and longer to build, must come to an end,” he said. “There is broad agreement on the need for acquisition and contracting reform in the Department of Defense. There have been enough studies, enough hand-wringing, enough rhetoric. Now is the time for action.”