America's Future Foundation

Robert Kagan:

Pentagon officials have leaked word that the Office of Management and Budget has ordered a 10 percent cut in defense spending for the coming fiscal year, giving Defense Secretary Robert Gates a substantially smaller budget than he requested.

As a candidate, Obama talked about using a “scalpel” to reduce government in a surgical and precise manner. A ten percent across-the-board cut doesn’t sound surgical at all. And what about Obama’s commitment to win the war in Afghanistan while increasing the overall size of our land forces?

This decision isn’t final, so we can hope that Obama remembers his commitments and restores all or most of the Pentagon’s budget. At a moment like this, I am quite glad that Bob Gates is still in charge of DoD.

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