US military budget for 2010

Robert Gates unveiled his military budget for 2010. A good analysis can be found here. And another one here. Some media outlets are emphasizing the deep cuts in the budget: this is true, there are cuts, but overall, the budget is a slight increase of Bush's last budget. Summary:

"They’re calling it a fundamental shift, and that’s both true and false," said Miriam Pemberton, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. "It’s true because their budget proposes the most ambitious set of cuts to well-entrenched weapons systems since the early 1990s."

"It’s false, though, because this budget perpetuates the upward trajectory of defense spending, it’s higher than any of the Bush budgets that preceded it, and it increases funding for some programs that I think are a mistake," Pemberton continued.

The $534 billion budget for fiscal year 2010 – which does not take into account the "emergency supplemental" appropriations that pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – marks a slight increase over the Bush administration’s budget for the previous year.

However, the breakdown of this spending will be considerably different from previous years.