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.
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