Re the proposed "cut" in military spending

A reminder from iWatch that the much-talked-about budgetary changes are actually smaller increases, not actual decreases.

Actually, describing it as a cut is a misnomer. The administration's ten-year plan actually calls for an increase in the national security budget over the next decade — but it would scale back the 18 percent boost previously set for that period...

Before Obama announced his plan, the Pentagon was counting on annual budget increases over the next 10 years -- totaling roughly $500 billion, according to Panetta. While the new plan calls for its spending to drop in 2013, the budget would then revert to growth, administration officials say. They have not said what the average annual increase would be from 2017 to 2021, but two senior administration officials who asked not to be named said the result after 10 years would still be a larger budget, even after inflation is taken into account.

That means Obama’s proposed changes will shift actual spending less than one percent annually. If approved, the change would be smaller than the genuine reductions that followed the Korean War (20 percent), the Vietnam War (30 percent) and the Cold War (30 percent)...

Obama said on January 5 that after his proposed changes, U.S. military spending will still be “larger than roughly the next 10 nations combined.” He did not list them, but those countries are, in rough order (according to data compiled by the International Institute of Strategic Studies and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute), China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Germany, India, Italy, and Brazil. Experts have complained that Obama understated the American predominance, by not saying “the next 17 or 18 nations combined,” but China’s military budget is opaque, making this calculation imprecise...

But there is no dispute that the higher capabilities of modern weaponry make simple numerical comparisons inadequate. Panetta’s airplane tally, for example, only counted manned airplanes, while 41 percent of the service’s winged inventory now consists of unmanned drones...

More at the link.