INTERVIEW-Obama likely to maintain US military spending

By Andrew Gray WASHINGTON, June 30 (Reuters) - Democratic candidate Barack Obama is unlikely to make any quick cuts in U.S. defense spending as president despite pledging to rely less on military power than George W. Bush, an adviser to the Illinois senator said on Monday. "It's hard to see how we could spend less on the military in the near term," Richard Danzig, a former Navy secretary who advises Obama on national security, told Reuters in an interview. Danzig said cuts would be hard to make due to the costs of Obama's plan to withdraw troops from Iraq and of repairing and replacing equipment from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said current Pentagon budget projections also appeared to underestimate the cost of new weapons programs. Bush has submitted a budget of more than $500 billion for the Pentagon for the next... [read full story]