Congressman John McHugh, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, makes some excellent points in this op-ed protesting the Obama defense budget. He writes:

Most media coverage announced that President Obama did not deliver anticipated cuts and actually increased spending by 4 percent over the 2009 budget. But the real story lies in what will be inserted into the budget. By moving war costs out of the supplemental and into the base budget the reported growth is in fact minimal. This is why Defense Secretary Robert Gates greeted the budget release by announcing he would have to make some “tough choices.”

The fact that the Department of Defense has to make “tough choices”– such as trading off current readiness against future procurement of weapons systems — is hard to understand given that (a) we are still fighting at least two wars and (b) non-defense spending is skyrocketing. As McHugh notes: “Through the stimulus bill, expanded Troubled Asset Relief Program funding, and the omnibus appropriations bill, the president has acted to ensure that this year’s total discretionary spending will surpass the $1 trillion mark — more than we have spent on Iraq, Afghanistan and Katrina combined.”

Unfortunately McHugh is one of the few commenting on this discrepancy. Dissenters need to make more of an issue of Obama’s schizophrenic attitude toward spending: parsimonious with our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines; profligate with the Democrats’ dubious domestic constituencies.