Obama, watchdog groups need to remain vigilant on military budget

Excerpts from recent editorials in newspapers in the United States:

San Antonio (Texas) Express-News, on the military budget:

Credit President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates for restoring a little fiscal sanity to the military budget. The president signed the 2010 defense authorization bill last month.

At $680 billion, the measure still authorizes plenty of federal spending on programs with questionable value to any military challenges on the horizon. ...

However, Obama and Gates were able to pare down some of the more egregious examples of politicians trying to use the military budget to score home-state and home-district federal spending. ...

Another sound change in the new defense measure is that it authorizes $550 billion for the Pentagon's base budget as well as $130 billion for U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for the current fiscal year. That's an attempt to actually budget those wars, something the Bush administration - which consistently relied on supplemental funding outside the normal Pentagon budget - never did.

The budget process isn't over. Now that Congress has authorized military spending for 2010, it still has to appropriate funds. That gives politicos on Capitol Hill and special interests another crack at larding the defense budget with earmarks for unneeded projects and weapons systems. The Obama administration and watchdog groups will need to remain vigilant.