Washington (CNN) -- One of the most sustained applauses during President Barack Obama's speech Tuesday night was in response to the need to cut back government spending.
But he got a tepid smattering of applause when he held up cuts proposed by the Department of Defense as a prime example.
"The secretary of defense has also agreed to cut tens of billions of dollars in spending that he and his generals believe our military can do without," Obama said in his State of the Union address.
Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee gave voice to their misgivings the morning after the speech as they criticized some of the most high-profile proposals for defense spending cuts.
Several congressmen, including Rep. Buck McKeon, R-California, the chairman of the committee, were upset about the plan to trim the Department of Defense budget by $78 billion in coming years.
"The reduction of an additional $78 billion from the department's funding, top-line, caught this committee by surprise," McKeon said. "And we intend to pursue the impact of this decision by the administration."
Rep. John Kline, R-Minnesota, criticized a proposal to reduce the size of the armed forces by cutting tens of thousands of soldiers and Marines after the nation's commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan have been reduced.
"I have grave concerns about some of the cuts," Kline said at the hearing Wednesday. "We should not be looking at reducing the end strength of the Marine Corps and the Army."
Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn reminded the committee that "the proposals we have are conditions-based." Lynn said if conditions are not right for reducing end strength, "we will have to re-evaluate."
Another frequent target of the Republicans on the committee was Gate's plan to shelve the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, or EFV. That's a Marine amphibious vehicle designed to replace the systems now used to carry Marines from ships to the beach for assaults.
Rob Wittman, R-Virginia, wanted to know why the Defense Department is willing to scrap the vehicle now.
"We spent $3 billion and processed through 20 years of development on the EFV and now we're saying it's changed course, it's too expensive and we can't afford it," Wittman said.
Gen. Joseph Dunford, the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, said that cost is, indeed, one of the reasons the vehicle should be cut.
"We found that that the EFV alone ate up 50% of our overall procurement dollars, and exceeded 100% of how much money we typically spend on our ground tactical fleet. To put that in some perspective, our EFV program was 573 vehicles and we've got 43- to 45,000 vehicles in our fleet today," Dunford said. "The EFV simply took too much money away."
The top Democrat on the committee praised the Department of Defense's proposals for saving money.
"I really want to applaud Secretary Gates and the others at the DoD for stepping up to that very difficult challenge to looking at our budget and saying. 'Where can we save money?" said Rep. Adam Smith of Washington. "There's no place where you're going to save money where somebody isn't going to complain about it."
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