In budgets as in war, hope is not a strategy.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: Defense Watch

Wishful thinking has been taken to new heights in this year's Pentagon budget. The most sanguine of the assumptions in the funding proposal is that Congress will somehow make peace after years of partisan trench warfare and approve $74 billion in additional discretionary spending to be divided equally between defense and nondefense.

Less obvious but just as unrealistic are many of the "savings" that the Defense Department built into its budget. These amount to tens of billions of dollars that the Pentagon would save from initiatives like closing bases, retiring the Air Force A-10 fleet, reforming military compensation and reorganizing the Army's helicopter fleet. Everyone knows none of these initiatives has a snowball's chance of being approved by Congress, but the Pentagon baked them into the budget anyway.

Pie-in-the-sky savings estimates are a time-honored budget tactic. Without them, the military would have to cut additional spending at a time when it feels it has cut enough.

Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord dismissed criticism of the budget as being more aspirational than grounded in political reality. "I would take issue with that," he said during a news conference. "Every year that we've had a budget since the Budget Control Act was signed, we have asked for something higher than sequester, and every year we have gotten something higher than sequester." Although the Pentagon has not received 100 percent of what it's asked for, "We believe that stating what we think we need has been useful and productive."

McCord defended the plan. He said the savings proposals are consistent with what the administration has pushed for years as a way to cut cost and free up money to pay for pressing needs like military training and equipment.

McCord's argument aside, there is a larger question about the administration's use of the budget as a political tool. It is something every president does, although the 2016 budget pushes the boundaries, said former Pentagon Comptroller Dov Zakheim, who served during the George W. Bush administration.

"How likely is Congress to agree on taxes or domestic spending?" he asked. "There's an unbelievably excessive degree of optimism in the president's 2016 budget. They're wearing rose-colored glasses."

The savings that are factored into the Pentagon's budget are just as unrealistic, Zakheim said in an interview. The habit of counting the chickens before they are hatched only adds to the Pentagon's mounting budget...