Now that the House Armed Services Committee is overwhelmingly rejecting the 2015 military budget, which included some cuts to portions of the military’s overall budget, the Pentagon insists it was “firmly behind” the cuts the whole time.
Yet the committee didn’t get unanimously averse to the cuts on their own. Rather it was weeks on testimony from generals, admirals and other Pentagon officials filled with scare stories about sequestration that led the committee to vote in favor of an alternative that included all of the increases, but none of the cuts.
The initial proposal included some cuts that most have conceded were a long time in coming, including the closure of several bases that are neither needed nor wanted.
The Pentagon had previously spun the base closures as an opportunity to shift spending to more important venues elsewhere in their budget, and instead seem to be getting a budget that gives them all those shifts, and the money to ignore the cuts that were supposed to pay for them. Where the US will ultimately get the money to pay for such dramatic increases in spending remains totally ignored, and after harping on about the perils of “Russian aggression,” the Pentagon seems to have succeeded in having their cake and eating it too.