“Largest Pentagon Budget” 2/1

Institute for Public Accuracy
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Reuters reports: "President Barack Obama on Monday asked Congress to
approve a record $708 billion in defense spending for fiscal year 2011,
including a 3.4 percent increase in the Pentagon's base budget and $159
billion to fund U.S. military missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan."

JO COMERFORD, http://nationalpriorities.org
     Comerford is executive director of the National Priorities Project,
which analyzes budget choices. She said today: "The Obama administration
has handed us the largest Pentagon budget since World War II, not
including the $160 billion in war funding for Iraq and Afghanistan. It
contains some small progress on Cold War weapons, but these are
'low-hanging fruit.' The president has called for 'hard choices' in
federal spending, but the Pentagon hasn't been asked to make any."

MIRIAM PEMBERTON, http://www.ips-dc.org/staff/miriam
     Research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies' Foreign Policy
in Focus, Pemberton said today: "At $744 billion, the military budget
(including military programs outside the Pentagon, such as the
Department of Energy's nuclear weapons management) is a budget of
add-ons, rather than choices. And it makes the imbalance between
spending on military vs. non-military security tools worse. The
Secretary of Defense himself has said, repeatedly, that the extreme
imbalance between what is spent on military and on non-military foreign
engagement is not in our best interests. The budget released today
actually makes this situation worse, and his own department’s budget is
primarily responsible."
     Pemberton, who is on a task force that produces the annual "Unified
Security Budget of the United States," just co-wrote the piece "A
Military Budget of Add-ons, Not Choices, Makes the Security Imbalance
Worse." http://www.ips-dc.org/articles/a_military_budget_of_add-ons

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020, (202) 421-6858; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167