While Congress and the president have been spending like drunken sailors on the domestic side, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was given his budget number and told to go make it work. The proposed budget, we were told, would require “hard choices.” These were also frankly false choices, as the president likes to say. False, because they resulted from an arbitrary budget figure imposed by the White House and without regard to our actual national security needs. As Tom Donnelly and Gary Schmitt of AEI wrote back in April:

Mr. Gates justifies these cuts as a matter of “hard choices” and “budget discipline,” saying that “[E]very defense dollar spent to over-insure against a remote or diminishing risk . . . is a dollar not available to take care of our people, reset the force, win the wars we are in.” But this calculus is true only because the Obama administration has chosen to cut defense, while increasing domestic entitlements and debt so dramatically.

The budget cuts Mr. Gates is recommending are not a temporary measure to get us over a fiscal bump in the road. Rather, they are the opening bid in what, if the Obama administration has its way, will be a future U.S. military that is smaller and packs less wallop. But what is true for the wars we’re in — that numbers matter — is also true for the wars that we aren’t yet in, or that we simply wish to deter.

Nevertheless, to one degree or another, Congress is pushing back on the White House.

The Senate, for example, has put money back in for the F-22’s. The White House threatens to veto it. Really? They want to explain why they aren’t “saving or creating” jobs? They want to explain why a $787B stimulus plan sailed through but there is no money for a state-of-the-art fighter? Right…

Then there is missile defense. Some might wonder what a possible justification could be for cutting back on missile defense programs at the same time North Korea and Iran are developing nuclear weapons and the former is getting ready to lob a missile at Hawaii. So Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Il) brought an amendment to the House floor to restore $1.2B cut from missile defense. His amendment was defeated, but some in the Senate may have something to say about this. In some ways, this is the most incomprehensible aspect of the Defense Department belt-tightening. As Eric Cantor argues in a column today:

Two particularly bad decisions, for example, were to eliminate funding for the Kinetic Energy Interceptor and to reduce funding for the Airborne Laser program by 53 percent. KEI and ABL offer the potential to bring down an Iranian or North Korean missile in its earliest stages of flight.

President Obama and his allies in both chambers of Congress argue that these programs are nonessential because they will not be operational in the immediate future. This is a remarkably short-sighted refrain that only delays the date when we will be able to safeguard against emerging threats. The same arguments were made years ago against the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), an Army system designed to take out missiles in their final stage of flight. Today, THAAD has one of the highest performance rates in anti-missile tests. And as we prepare for the upcoming North Korean launch, the military has rushed an additional THAAD unit to Hawaii as insurance.

Whether for purely parochial reasons or out of deeply-seated concern about national security, Congress may not, it seems, accept the defense budget edict from the White House. If Congress puts back money for either the F-22’s or missile defense or both, lawmakers next might take a look at the rest of the defense budget. After all, we have some pretty big national security challenges. Perhaps we should examine closely whether the Obama administration is addressing the very real threats we face or just pinching defense to pay for the domestic liberal wish list of programs.