From our friends  Frida Berrigan and  Bill Hartung
at the Arms and Security Initiative:

Dear Friends,

Amid the din of excitement about the Oscars and the Superbowl, the
Obama administration's budget is getting some attention.

It should-- it is enormous! A whopping $3.8 trillion in federal
spending.

Have you heard our explanation of one trillion? Okay, we did not make
it up, but we use it alot. One million seconds from now is 11½ days
later. A billion seconds is 32 years later. And a trillion seconds is
32,000 years later. Does that help you imagine $3.8 trillion in
federal spending?

Let's break it down: more than half of that money-- $2.4 trillion-- is
"non-discretionary:" funding levels for entitlements like Medicaid,
Medicare and Social Security that are locked in over years. The rest--
$1.4 trillion-- is "discretionary;" the parts of the budget that
Congress makes decisions about each year. So, of the $1.4 trillion
that Congress is considering for 2011, $708.3 billion (or more than
half) is slated for military purposes, including the Pentagon's base
budget, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the nuclear weapons-
related activities in the Department of Energy.

The Obama administration’s federal budget proposal includes freezes on
spending levels for about 120 different (mostly) domestic programs,
with the Office of Management and Budget estimating that over three
years these spending freezes will generate $250 billion in savings.

At the same time, military spending is up. The total of $708.3 billion
includes $159 billion in projected war spending for 2011.

For 2010, the base Pentagon budget was $531 billion with another
$129.6 billion in budgeted war spending. In addition, Congress will
have to pass at least $33 billion more for 2010 to pay for President
Obama’s surge in Afghanistan.

Accompanying news of the biggest military budget of all times, was the
release of the Quadrennial Defense Review, a report on military
strategy and posture that comes out every four years (hence the word
quadrennial). The big news of the big report is that the United States
is no longer going to prepare to fight two major wars at the same
time. Long the preferred hallmark of American military superiority,
the two war doctrine is going out of fashion just as the United States
finds itself fighting (and not winning) two wars.

Instead of this ambitious agenda, the Pentagon’s new strategy will be
a much more limited and strategic four prong focus (are you getting
the sarcasm?) that will have the United States: 1) prevail in today’s
wars, 2) prevent and deter future conflicts, 3) prepare to defeat
adversaries and succeed in a wide range of contingencies, 4) enhance
the all volunteer force. So there you have it. When you look at it
that way, $700 plus billion may not be enough.  The real question is
why the Pentagon is embracing this huge range of activities in the
name of "defense."

It will take some time to pour through the details in the doorstop-
sized budget, but below we offer some resources and analysis to help
wrap the mind around the budget behemoth.

_______________________________________________________________________________

BUDGET RESOURCES:

“Fiscal Year 2011 Defense Spending Request:Briefing Book”
Laicie Olson, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, February
2010
http://www.armscontrolcenter.org/assets/pdfs/FY_2011_Briefing_Book_Final.pdf

Taxpayers for Common Sense, regularly updated analysis of the budget
http://www.taxpayer.net/resources.php?category=&type=Project&proj_id=3136&action=Headlines%20By%20TCS

“Gates Shakes Up Leadership for F-35”
New York Times, February 2, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/us/politics/02pentagon.html
Best line of the article: “The defense industry is pleased but
bemused,” said Loren Thompson, the chief operating officer at the
Lexington Institute, a policy group financed partly by military
contractors. “It’s been telling itself for years that when the
Democrats got control it would be bad news for weapons programs. But
the spending keeps going on.”

“Obama Seeks Money for Nuclear Weapons Work”
Associated Press, February 1, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/01/AR2010020103384.html
The administration on Monday asked Congress for more than $7 billion
for activities related to nuclear weapons in the budget of the
National Nuclear Security Administration, an increase of $624 million
from the 2010 fiscal year.

QDR RESOURCES

“Vision Meets Reality: 2010 QDR and 2011 Defense Budget”
A (very timely) report by Travis Sharp, Center for a New American
Security, February 1, 2010
http://www.cnas.org/node/4054

“How to Read the QDR”
a shorter piece based Sharp’s report was published by Foreign Policy
Magazine, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/02/01/how_to_read_the_qdr

“QDR: Pentagon Revises Its Long-Held Two-War Doctrine”
Christian Science Monitor, February 1, 2010.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2010/0201/QDR-Pentagon-revises-its-long-held-two-war-doctrine

Quadrennial Defense Review (128 pages)
http://www.comw.org/qdr/fulltext/1002QDR2010.pdf

For a deeper analysis of trends in military spending
“An Undisciplined Defense: Understanding the $2 Trillion Surge in US
Defense Spending”
Carl Conetta, Project on Defense Alternatives, January 2010.
http://www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/1001PDABR20exsum.pdf