Reporters and Numbers, Part I

It’s hard to write budget stories, and even harder to write the lede on a budget story.  Things stay the same more than they change, so that’s boring, but when you throw in all those numbers, it gets confusing.

Government media manipulators rely upon this combination of little interest and less knowledge.  It’s particularly easy to sell stories of the man-bites-dog variety.  Thus, like last year, this year’s defense budget headline is: “Obama Is Spending More on Defense than Bush!”

There are two points to make here.  First of all, the reason that headline is even technically true is that, while the Bush Administration was ruled by warmongers, they liked fighting their wars on the cheap.  Thus it wasn’t until 2007 — and in connection with the departure of Donald Rumsfeld and the decision for the Iraq surge — that the Bush Administration felt the need to increase the size of the military, in particular the U.S. Army.  And when it came to weapons modernization, the “transformational” imperative to “skip a generation” of programs was never reversed.  It was left to the Obama team to finally kill projects like the F-22, but Bush had already crippled that and many other plans.

Second, and more difficult to follow, is a true apples-to-apples comparison of what counts as defense spending.  The administration peddled a similar line last year, but the big difference was that they counted Army personnel costs as regular defense spending instead of wartime spending.  Honest accounting, for sure, but not really a defense increase.

What accounts for a lot of this year’s “increase” is the cost of the Afghanistan surge.  The surge is a good thing, but it’s something that will put a further strain on the military, not an “increase” that will buy more defense capability.  It’s also — because budget projections for 2012 and beyond still have artificially low numbers pretending that all the fighting will have ended — dishonest accounting.

Ask yourself this question: if Obama is spending more than Bush, how come so many programs have been terminated?  How come those that have survived are stretched out?  Why will there be more force-structure cuts?  Apparently, Obama is getting less for more.

Now there’s the lede.

Tom Donnelly is director of the Center for Defense Studies.