The $50 billion figure is a deceptive one, several defense analysts argued Monday. Congress has offloaded large chunks of the Pentagon's regular budget, particularly in operations and maintenance, to "emergency spending" - that is, the Iraq and Afghan wars supplemental spending bills.

What that does, then, is free up money inside the regular non-emergency $420 billion defense budget for other projects, according to Winslow Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information.

Congress is limited in its annual spending by a budget cap. Anything it wants to add to the budget it has to balance out by commensurate cuts elsewhere.

However, the war is being funded by emergency supplementals, which are not counted against the budget cap. Congress has regularly shifted billions out of the annual operations and maintenance account to the war supplemental and filled in the blanks left in the budget with other projects.

In the 2006 defense authorization bill the House Armed Services Committee moved $2.5 billion out of regular O&M into a new, unrequested $50 billion war supplemental "just creating room to buy goodies," said Cindy Williams, a principal research scientist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Wheeler, joined by Williams and two other experts, believes this is a budget "train wreck" waiting to happen.

"Politicians in this town have not seriously engaged on this issue - neither progressives (nor) the people who support and believe in this war but aren't willing to pay for it," he said.

"The defense debate in this country is in a sense focused on war, and that changes debate on non-war issues. So if you are not in support of the F-22 (a new fighter jet not in use in the war) that translates to spitting on a soldier when he comes home," Wheeler said.

Williams sees a defense budget "train wreck" in three parts: a procurement budget that is buying extremely expensive weapons at a glacial pace; a personnel system that carries with it a staggering long-term cost for retiree and family benefits, and the cost of the war, which has not yet been paid for, as it is being "funded" by the deficit.

The question is, "When do deficits become a real-time political issue for politicians?" asked Steven Kosiak, director of budget studies for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

The next opportunity for debate may be the 2006 elections if a poll taken in March by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes is any indication of public will.

In the poll, 1,182 people in the United States were presented with the proposed 2006 discretionary federal budget and how it was divided among major accounts. The respondents were invited to reallocate the budget, including putting a portion toward reducing the deficit, although they were not told the size of the deficit.

Given the option, the majority of respondents cut the defense budget by about one-third - $133 billion. They took most of the money out of nuclear and large-scale conventional spending but left largely intact spending on military personnel, whom they rated very favorably.

They would cut spending in Iraq and Afghanistan by about $29 billion, or again about one-third.

They left largely unchanged those accounts necessary for fighting unconventional wars: intelligence, Special Forces, peacekeeping, communications and counterinsurgency.

The respondents also opted for a defense budget that would rely more on multilateral international operations rather than solitary military operations.

When presented with the defense spending accounts of U.S. adversaries, they would cut U.S. defense spending overall. The United States dramatically outspends countries like China and North Korea in their respective defense budgets.

A large majority favored rolling back the president's tax cuts in order to reduce the deficit, according to the poll.

They would also pump $36 billion of the money cut from the defense budget into reducing the deficit; add $27 billion to education; add $24 billion to energy; put $19 billion into job training; add $15 billion to medical research and give an additional $12 billion to veterans' benefits, a 40-percent increase.

The Pentagon is poised to receive about $420 billion in 2006. The House and Senate have produced respective authorization bills. The appropriations committees are still completing work on next year's funding levels.

The four bills will have to be approved by both houses and reconciled before they are signed by the president and go into effect in October 2005, the start of the fiscal year.

The defense budget in 2005 is roughly $400 billion, with about $100 billion additionally being spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Iraq war costs about $4.8 billion a month. The Afghan operation comes to about $700 million a month, according to the Pentagon.

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