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President Obama’s recent announcement to cut the Pentagon budget has angered many Republicans and conservatives. On January 5th Obama announced that the defense budget would be cut by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade. The plan includes reducing the number of Army troops from 570,000 to 490,000 while relying more heavily on Naval and Air forces. The President justified this change as the majority of military operations in Iraq have ended, and plans for long-term withdrawal from Afghanistan are in the works. Over the weekend Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced a revised military strategy consistent with the impending cuts. The strategy included reviving a Bush-era plan to halve the number of American combat brigades in Europe. Former Presidential candidate and Arizona Senator, Republican John McCain, denounced the cuts and said they would “give the perception of American weakness” and place the country “in the greatest peril” in decades. Right wing bloggers have been up in arms, claiming that programs like Social Security and Medicare ought to be cut in place of the military. However, when adjusted for inflation, today’s Defense budget is the highest it has ever been in the history of the United States, eating up twenty percent of the entire federal budget. Much to the dismay of progressives, Obama’s plan actually works out to minuscule cuts to the military, limiting budgetary increases to either keep up with inflation, or fall a few percent short, depending on how inflation is calculated. Over the next ten years, the US will still spend more on its military than the next ten military spending nations combined.

GUEST: Catherine Lutz, a department chair at Brown University and co-director of the “Costs of War” study done there, and editor of the book “The Bases of Empire: The Struggle Against U.S. Military Posts.”

Visit www.costsofwar.org for more information.