Oh, Leon…
By It’s fun to teach the bureaucratic politics segment of National Security Policy during such momentous times. Panetta:
The federal budget is roughly about $4 trillion. About a trillion of that is in what’s called discretionary funds on the domestic side and on the defense side. Three-fourths of the federal budget is wrapped up in entitlement programs. And I said, you know, you’ve cut the hell out of the discretionary side of the budget. You’ve taken steps; I’m going to implement those cuts. But the time has come, if you’re serious about deficit reduction, you got to take on the three-fourths of the budget that has grown incredibly over these last few years, and you got to deal with revenues.
Why does Leon Panetta say such alarming things about the world and the defense budget, despite a pretty moderate Congressional record on the defense budget? Why, in fact, does he sound so much more hawkish about defense than his predecessor? “Where you sit is where you stand” explains the first, but not the second; Panetta obviously feels vulnerable to forces within DoD in a way that Gates didn’t. The sad truth of defense politics is that DoD critters feel more secure with a Republican at the helm, even when that Republican is interested in/open to defense cuts. As with all experienced bureaucrats, DoD insiders have ways to resist and undermine civilian appointees, usually in conjunction with the uniformed services and with Congressional allies. It’s an almost textbook case bureaucratic politics interacting with ideology; Panetta doesn’t have sufficient street cred to talk tough on the budget, whereas Gates had much more latitude to speak in terms of possible and necessary cuts to defense spending. This isn’t to say that DoD never resists Republicans (Rumsfeld eventually wore out his welcome), but there’s a reason why Clinton and then Obama decided to go with moderate GOPsters at SecDef. In the long term, it doesn’t do Democrats any favors to treat Republicans as the defense budget grownups, but for a US President there is no such thing as “the long term.”