Turning tide? Lawmakers look to Pentagon for budget cuts

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/01/28/181081/turning-tide-lawmakers-look-to.html



The military may be facing cuts

Turning tide? Lawmakers look to Pentagon for budget cuts
By James Rosen | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Monday, January 28, 2013

WASHINGTON — As another debt-deal deadline looms this winter in Congress, an unusual alliance of lawmakers has joined forces to put the Pentagon budget under greater scrutiny and to end the almost carte blanche status it enjoyed in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In a letter last month to President Barack Obama and congressional leaders, 11 Democratic and 11 Republican lawmakers asked that Defense Department spending be put squarely on the table in the coming clashes over debt reduction.

“We believe that substantial defense savings can be achieved over the long term without compromising national security, through strategic reductions in the Pentagon’s budget,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter.

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But some military experts, both analysts who favor deeper spending cuts and those who oppose them, say there are additional reasons for the re-examination: The record federal debt, now at more than $16.4 trillion, has become a crucial priority that Pentagon leaders say affects military planning. At the same time, the national urgency over anti-terrorism has subsided as the Sept. 11 attacks recede into the chronological distance; the Iraq War has ended, the Afghanistan War is winding down and anti-terror efforts shift to new strongholds such as Mali and Yemen.