Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation

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The Heritage Foundation’s Missile Defense Fantasies

Check out my latest article responding to an op-ed by Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner on missile defense. Here’s the into:

Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner’s op-ed in the Washington Times on April 23 muddled the history of ballistic missile defense when he blamed President Barack Obama for the inability of the United States to field anything more than a nascent missile defense system. The United States has been developing missile defense systems for almost sixty years without success. Without irony, his solution to persistent cost overruns and schedule delays would be to increase the missile defense budget by nearly 40%, adding an additional three billion dollars a year to an already astronomical price tag. Furthermore, Dr. Feulner approves of the United States’ abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty that contributed to strategic stability for forty years by trying to argue that missile defense, if it actually worked, would improve relations between the United States and Russia despite repeated threats from Russian military officials regarding the future of missile defenses in Europe…

Can President Obama Live Up to the Accomplishments of His Predecessors?

This article was originally published at http://www.democracyarsenal.org/ and also appeared on CNN’s Global Public Square Blog. By Nickolas Roth President Obama was recently overheard saying to Russian President Medvedev that, assuming he prevails in the election this November, he would have more flexibility to negotiate on arms control issues. In response, some Congressional Republicans have […]

Fiscal Year 2012 Briefing Book Now Online

For Fiscal Year (FY) 2012, which begins on October 1, 2011, the Obama Administration has requested a base budget of $553 billion for the Department of Defense (DOD). This is $13 billion below the Pentagon’s Future Years Defense Program (FYDP) estimate, released last year, but represents about 3 percent in real growth over the funding the department would receive for FY 2011 under the current continuing resolution, which expires on March 4.

In addition, the Administration has requested $117.6 billion for Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is a 26 percent decrease from last year’s request of $159.4 billion and represents the administration’s commitment to reduce troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan and place more strict rules on what can and cannot be included in the war spending request. In the past, additional funding has been made available through emergency supplemental appropriations, when needed. This remains a possibility for FY 2012. This brings the FY 2012 defense budget request to a total of $670.6 billion.

These numbers do not include nuclear weapons related spending in the Department of Energy (DoE) or other defense related funding.

In addition to an initial $670 billion for the Pentagon’s base budget and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Administration has requested $18 billion for nuclear weapons activities at Department of Energy and $7 billion for additional non-Pentagon defense related activities. This brings total non-Pentagon defense related spending (053/054) to $25 billion, an increase of about $200 million over FY 2011.

Click here for the full analysis of the FY 2012 request.

Obama Signs (and Ratifies) New START

Today, February 2, 2011, President Obama signed New START!!! NoH was invited to the ceremony, but sadly had other pressing business to attend to (I kid, I kid, both about being invited and the other pressing business)! The treaty has now officiall…

Cuts are coming: Will the entire budget be on the table?

As expected, President Obama’s address last night focused heavily on the deficit.  Most points we saw coming:

So tonight, I am proposing that starting this year, we freeze annual domestic spending for the next five years. (Applause.) Now, this would reduce the deficit by more than $400 billion over the next decade, and will bring discretionary spending to the lowest share of our economy since Dwight Eisenhower was President.

This freeze will require painful cuts. Already, we’ve frozen the salaries of hardworking federal employees for the next two years. I’ve proposed cuts to things I care deeply about, like community action programs. The Secretary of Defense has also agreed to cut tens of billions of dollars in spending that he and his generals believe our military can do without. (Applause.)

(For a translation of that last part, on Defense, see Josh Rogin’s post at The Cable or mine yesterday.)

More importantly, though, in terms of the budget, the President’s speech contained lines like this:

Now, most of the cuts and savings I’ve proposed only address annual domestic spending, which represents a little more than 12 percent of our budget. To make further progress, we have to stop pretending that cutting this kind of spending alone will be enough. It won’t. (Applause.)

The bipartisan fiscal commission I created last year made this crystal clear. I don’t agree with all their proposals, but they made important progress. And their conclusion is that the only way to tackle our deficit is to cut excessive spending wherever we find it –- in domestic spending, defense spending, health care spending, and spending through tax breaks and loopholes. (Applause.)

Today, the Congressional Budget Office raised its estimate of the budget deficit to $1.5 trillion for this year, on track to beat out the previous record of $1.4 trillion, set in 2009.

House majority leader Eric Cantor, House budget chairman Paul Ryan and others have echoed the president’s insistence that the entire budget be on the table.  It has yet to be seen what, if anything, will come of these statements.  No doubt, cuts are coming.  The question is where.

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