Pentagon Freeze Cuts $26B From Obama's Request

A Senate subcommittee voted to freeze basic Pentagon spending at $513 billion. The freeze for 2012 would cut about $26 billion from President Barack Obama’s original request, The Washington Post reported.

However, the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee added an additional $117.8 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for a total of about $630 billion, a figure $18 billion below what the House approved in July. The full Appropriations Committee will take up the measure later this week.

Committee Chairman Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, said that, despite the cuts, the bill “takes care of our men and women in uniform and their families, fully supports military readiness, protects the forces and maintains our technological edge.”

The subcommittee approved a 1.6 percent pay raise for military personnel. Cuts included $5 billion because of planned troop reductions in Afghanistan next year, $1.5 billion the Pentagon said it didn’t need, and $695 million from the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, the Post reported.

As a result of August’s debt-ceiling deal and the “supercommittee” that mandates the government come up with $1.2 trillion in federal spending reductions, the Pentagon could be facing hundreds of billions of addition cuts should an agreement not be reached, the Post reported.