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The Obama administration should make baseline defense budget cuts in order to fund the cost of sending an additional 30,000 U.S troops to Afghanistan, according to Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Lawrence Korb.

"We feel this would be a step in the right direction to begin dealing with the cost of these wars, which now have exceeded about one trillion dollars and have added immensely to our deficit problems," said Korb during a conference call with reporters on Tuesday.

Korb and others at CAP recently released a report calling on President Obama to cut defense programs considered not vital to keeping the nation safe from attack in order to offset the cost of the upcoming surge. Among the report's key recommendations are cuts to ballistic missile defense spending, offensive space-based weapons spending, future combat systems spending, and a draw-down of the nation's nuclear forces.

Korb referred to these programs as "items that could be reduced [or] delayed without any impact on national security."

Korb's colleague at CAP, Vice President for Economic Policy Michael Ettlinger, cited an excess of defense spending as one of the main reasons the administration should consider the report.

"One part of the budget that's...gonna have to be examined is defense spending. It's about one-fifth of the federal budget. We spend 4.3% of GDP on defense, which is more than any other advanced country by far."

"If you add in what we're spending on the supplementals, it's more than the rest of the world combined," added Korb.

Supplemental appropriations are often subject to little scrutiny, and allow Congress to tack on program spending after a budget has been set. In the CAP report, Korb implored the current administration to bypass funding the troop increase through a war supplemental, calling it an "opaque" process.