The DC Examiner has an excellent editorial today on the Administration's hacking away at defense needs in their monstrosity of a $3.6 trillion budget.

It isn't the amount of cuts that is the main problem; it's where the president intends to realize his "savings:"

Defense News reported last month that Obama, quite bizarrely, made Department of Defense (DOD) officials sign a document pledging “strict confidentiality” on details of the 2010 defense budget. Why should the Pentagon’s budget options be any more confidential than, say, those of the State Department or the Department of Health and Human Services? Because Obama wants to hide the details of how he intends to slash defense spending 8.2 percent below the level planned under President George W. Bush. Until Congress howled, Obama even considered delaying by five more years the contract for a new generation of Air Force refueling tankers, to replace the creaking, half-century-old fleet. Replacing these ancient tankers has been the Pentagon’s most urgent procurement priority for at least a decade, now spanning three presidential administrations.

 

The very existence of Obama’s tanker trial balloon is symptomatic of his fundamental under-appreciation of American security needs as DOD approaches this year’s mandatory Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). “There's a pattern emerging that could subvert the QDR process,” Air Force Lt. Gen. (ret) Thomas McInerney, a widely read military expert,  told The Examiner. “For instance, if you cancel the F-22 [fighter jet] line, or the combat search and rescue helicopter… or cancel much of the Future Combat System or even delay up to five years the tanker proposal, then you find that you may have gone from a two-war strategy to a one-war strategy…. What you are seeing across-the-board is that the Air Force and Navy are the bill-payers for an emerging ground-centric strategy, with only irregular warfare as the spotlight.”