AEI & Heritage Target Rebuilding GOP Views On ‘Common Defense’

http://breakingdefense.com/2013/06/25/aei-heritage-aim-to-rebuild-conservative-consensus-on-the-common-defense/



AEI & Heritage Target Rebuilding GOP Views On ‘Common Defense’
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on June 25, 2013 at 1:04 PM

Tomorrow morning, one of the Republican Party’s rising stars, Sen. Kelly Ayotte, will kick off a new project co-sponsored by two of its long-established institutions, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. The official agenda of the “Project for the Common Defense” is to build a new bipartisan consensus on national security. But the first challenge, the organizers acknowledge, is to rebuild some kind of national security consensus among Republicans.

“It would be wonderful if we could spark a revival of interest in national security issues among liberals and Democrats,” said Tom Donnelly, who’s helming the project at AEI. (James Carafano is his counterpart at Heritage). “But we’re also realistic about the political landscape as it is… As much as we don’t want to form a circular firing squad among conservatives – and as much as that story line is catnip to the mainstream media – we do want to have a conversation about the need for American military strength.”

As the ongoing stalemate over sequestration shows, in addition to all the bitter divisions between the two parties, GOP defense hawks and budget hawks have split over defense spending. At issue is whether the military is too important to be subjected to the same steep cuts as other discretionary spending, as is happening under the Budget Control Act as currently written.

“Here we have this sequester which everybody has condemned, so how does a system (still) do something that everybody condemns and everybody believe is against the national interest?” asked former Senator Jim Talent, a senior fellow at Heritage and one of the project’s architects, in a Monday evening phone call. “(It’s) a lack of clarity about why defense is important, so it just becomes another mouth that has to be fed.”