The strategic review will outline how the military can cut $450 billion from its budget, amid speculation that Congress may cut an additional $500 billion in the near future. Acknowledging an incapacity to wage two wars is not ideal, notes Andrew Krepinevich, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, but it's better than the alternative. "You may risk losing the confidence of some allies, and you may risk emboldening your adversaries," he says. "But at the end of the day, a strategy of bluffing, or asserting that you have a capability that you don’t, is probably the worst posture of all.” So what spending priorities are dragging down the military budget? Here are some of the major ones, highlighted this week by the The Times, The Washington Post and Time.
Military personnel costs "As it stands now, the Pentagon spends $181 billion each year, nearly a third of its base budget, on military personnel costs: $107 billion for salaries and allowances, $50 billion for health care and $24 billion in retirement pay," report Elisabeth Bumiller and Thom Shanker in the Times. "One independent analyst ... has calculated that if military personnel costs continue rising at the rate they have over the past decade, and overall Pentagon spending does not increase, by 2039 the entire defense budget would be consumed by personnel costs."
Troops in Afghanistan and beyond "Sometime this year, there must be decisions on how to downsize in Afghanistan," write The Washington Post's Walter Pincus, "and what arrangements can be made to keep U.S. forces there after 2014, whether to send military trainers back to Iraq, and how to respond if Congress authorizes dispatching Special Forces to Nigeria to assist in fighting a terrorist group, as it did when U.S. troops were sent to help battle the Lord’s Resistance Army in central Africa." More
