The Left has been lusting after the DOD budget to redeploy into social benefits since 1968.
"More flexibility" after the election, remember? This is the flexibility.
Putin was just waiting for the Olympics to be over the whole time.
As for budget priorities ...... for Socialists worldwide, social benefits exist as a way of sandbagging and undermining defense programs. So said a French admiral, Pierre Auphan, who saw the process at work in France in the 1930's when the Socialists got into office and savaged the French defense appropriations, ostensibly to buy groceries for Socialist voters, but actually to undermine the French military on the eve of a new world war.
That's because they see organized armies as the most effective defense tools against their kind of "wars of national liberation" -- as in Greece and Turkey in the 1950's, Malaya and the Philippines (Huks) in the 40's, and Laos and Vietnam in the 1960's.