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The early skirmishes on the long-term budget debate have been about trimming entitlement programs, like Medicare and Social Security. More quietly, but just as importantly, some Republicans have broached cutting defense/.../"There is a growing divide between the defense hawks and the fiscal hawks (among Republicans), and it is a matter of prioritization,'' said Todd Harrison, a senior defense budget fellow at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "Which do you think is a higher priority right now? Getting our budget in balance or funding defense?''Harrison said that "any real, serious plan to reduce the deficit is going to have to spread the cuts across all the big programs in the federal government, and look at the revenue side.''

The U.S. House Republican 2012 budget proposal represents the ceiling for talks on national security spending next year even as it leaves the Obama administration’s original $671 billion request intact, analysts and lawmakers said. The proposal, unveiled by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin yesterday, provides $553.1 billion for regular Defense Department operations and $117.8 billion for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq for fiscal year 2012, which begins Oct. 1. “That is about the most defense is going to get,” said Todd Harrison, an analyst with the non-partisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.  Harrison said that Ryan’s budget blueprint and the Pentagon’s request for 2012 will be the “high water mark” in the debate over government spending and reducing the deficit/…/CSBA’s Harrison said he does not see any “substantial” cuts to defense in 2012. Defense is more likely to be on the “chopping block” later in the decade, starting with the 2014 budget, the first budget to be proposed after next year’s presidential election, Harrison said. “Later in the decade the situation could be substantially different,” he said.

Come the end of this week, the Federal government might actually—for real this time—shut down for lack of a budget. Congress is debating a measure today that would fund the Feds for another week, and the Pentagon until Sept. 30, provided that billions are cut from other parts of the federal budget. Even if this happens, military leaders and analysts say that the continuing resolutions (CR) have already done damage to their modernization programs—damage that may be permanent/.../

If the West decides to arm Libya's disorganized rebel forces, they will have to deploy trainers on the ground and not merely deliver crates of weapons, former US officers and officials said/../Just providing equipment without instruction would mean "a lot of money that would be wasted," said Dakota Wood, a retired Marine officer and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "It isn't just the weapons that make the force effective, it's the skill with which the weapons are employed," Wood said.

The United States ended the Cold War the way a master pilot lands a fighter jet, in a sort of ecstasy of precision and the gradual reduction of force. Today, that same jet is screeching around the runway, as our capacity for messy outcomes (Iraq, Libya, Egypt) expands before our eyes. One place where the potential for unparalleled damage has increased is the US. That is because there are more tools available to terrorists, extremists or just plain kooks now than in 2001. How might a terror attack play out? Dr Andrew Krepinevich, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a non-profit research group in Washington, modeled such an attack in his book, 7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist Explores War in the 21st Century. Nuclear explosions are the main feature of his scenario for a terror attack in the US. But he foresees threats as large as nuclear attacks coming from other types of weapons. The point is not for Americans to scare themselves silly. It is to reconsider the antidotes.

U.S. warplanes, Suzanne, ships and missiles have been striking against Libya for more than a week now/.../ While NATO has agreed to take over the mission and take full command, the cost to the U.S. has been estimated at between $300 million to $1 billion so far in Libya/.../ Todd Harrison offers his financial estimate of the cost of the U.S. military action in Libya.