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The Final Gates Defense-Budget Showdown Begins

احدث اجدد واروع واجمل واشيك The Final Gates Defense-Budget Showdown Begins

What, you thought Roberts Gates was out the door as Pentagon chief? Before the defense secretary retires, it's looking like he's got one more fight over the defense budget left in him.

Gates' likely last hurrah is his "efficiencies initiative," an effort to wring $100 billion in budgetary fat out of the Pentagon so he can re-invest it in the guns, planes, and ships that thinks are vital. Unless the fat's cut, he's argued, the pressures of the budget deficit could compel deeper cuts, jeopardizing national security. Even advocates of growing the defense budget are cool with axing wasteful programs — except it's not been totally clear what Gates thinks is fat and what's muscle, and therein lies the controversy.

Expect to know more tomorrow. Gates will brief congressional leaders in the morning about what he intends to cut; a press briefing is likely to follow in the afternoon. (During a breakfast meeting with reporters today, Vice Adm. Jack Dorsett asked if the assembled hacks were getting psyched for Gates' big reveal.) But it's starting to look like Gates is going with a version of his strategy from two years ago, when he got rid of cherished-but-troubled programs yet modestly increased defense spending.

According to Bloomberg's Tony Capaccio, Gates resisted White House pressure to bring the overall budget down, winning an agreement to devote $554 billion (plus the cost of the wars) to defense in the next fiscal year. The budget Congress belatedly passed in December contained $548.9 billion in non-war defense spending. Gates reportedly wanted an additional $12 billion, but the figure lets him show congressional Republicans that he held the line on defense cuts and even came out ahead. (The White House plans to release the fiscal 2012 budget in February.)

Now for the programs Gates is axing. If the New York Times is right, the Marine Corps is in for a rough day tomorrow. As expected, Gates will kill the over-budget landing craft known as the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. And he'll also delay the Marines' version for the F-35 fighter jet for two years. His deeper elaboration of how to save $100 billion over five years in "efficiencies" will surely spread the pain beyond the Corps.

But losing the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle is a bitter pill for the Marines to swallow, since they don't have a backup landing craft for ship-to-shore operations. A retired Marine general, Gregory Newbold, acidly tells the Times, "We'll just pray that we don't have to go into harm's way in the next 10 years."

It's not just the Marines who are dissatisfied. The Pentagon-budget cutters at the Center for Defense Alternatives put out a preemptive strike on the reported budget increase, saying Gates' impending announcement "may steal the spotlight from deficit-reduction proposals before the new Congress has even had time to seat itself."

Got a sense of deja vu from 2009? Back then, Gates canceled a host of expensive military programs, from the Air Force's F-22 Raptor to the Army's Future Combat Systems. Back then, his overall budget still showed an increase from the previous year. And back then, he attracted a lot of opposition on the Hill. But he was able to distribute the pain evenly enough, politically, to get the budget passed. Does he have it in him to win a rematch, this time with a House that's more hostile to the administration?

Gates has proclaimed that this is his last year as Pentagon chief, the capstone to a four-decade career in public life. (Though we've heard that before.) We may have a better idea tomorrow if he's going to take his time in saying goodbye. If Gates has to sell another controversial budget to another skeptical Congress, it would be very surprising to see him go before the job is done.

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