Gates to announce program cuts Thursday - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Gates to announce program cuts Thursday

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert Gates is taking bold steps to try to spare the Pentagon from painful budget cuts, as newly elected tea party activists storm Capitol Hill pledging that no government program — even those for the troops — should be considered sacrosanct.

Gates was expected to announce Thursday that he would cancel a $13 billion plan to buy the Marines new armored vehicles from General Dynamics Corp. that can quickly ferry troops from ship to shore while under fire. Other cost-cutting measures were planned as well, including the delay of the Marine version of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, according to defense analysts familiar with the plan.

The steps are part of a broader effort by Gates to find some $100 billion in budget fat through 2016 that he can reinvest in programs for the troops and modernizing weapon systems. He hopes to stave off deep cuts imposed by the White House or Congress by showing that the federal government’s biggest spender takes fiscal discipline seriously.

How successful Gates will be in the long term remains unclear.

Loren Thompson, head of the Alexandria, Va.-based Lexington Institute and adviser to several major defense contractors, said the Pentagon had been told to whittle down its budget plan in coming years by as much as $150 billion. Thompson says that Gates was able to argue that only about $80 billion was practical.

Still, the Defense Department is being directed to create a spending plan for 2012 that doesn’t exceed $554 billion, instead of the $566 billion it initially wanted. The figure does not include war spending.

“Gates has done a good job so far in protecting the budget,” Thompson said. “But the deficit is so huge and the other claims on the budget so big that he is starting to lose ground.”

Last year, Gates pledged to trim the department’s bureaucracy by disbanding Joint Forces Command and cutting back on the number of general officers that staff the Pentagon.

He also announced that affordability would become a bigger concern in purchases, and that contracts exceeding $1 billion would be particularly scrutinized.

Lawmakers have been reluctant to propose reductions in military spending and risk appearing unsupportive of troops fighting abroad. But that could change, with the influx of tea party activists elected on the promise that government spending must be reined in at all cost.

“We have nearly doubled our military budget in the past 10 years,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told his local newspaper, The Courier-Journal, this week.

“To avoid bankruptcy, we will have to evaluate all spending — from food stamps to foreign aid to foreign wars,” he wrote in a letter to the editor.

Paul’s pledge and others like it by other freshman lawmakers has caused tension with veteran Republicans who see domestic spending as a better target for cuts.

“I worry a lot about the rise of protectionism and isolationism in the Republican Party,” said Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican who has fought against legislative earmarks but fiercely defended the Pentagon’s core budget.

While a top priority for the Marine Corps, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle has long been considered a target of Gates as he looked to trim the budget. Gates has questioned whether Marines will storm beaches in future wars, when potential U.S. adversaries are developing sophisticated weapons that can easily attack ships hovering close to shore.

The budget plan was first reported this week by Reuters.