WP: Bill Bulges With Unforeseen Spending for Guns, Tanks

[Pirate Smile]

Bill Bulges With Unforeseen Spending for Guns, Tanks
Senate to Take Up Measure as Military Fights to Keep Materiel Working

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 20, 2006; Page A01

With the expected passage this spring of the largest emergency spending bill in history, annual war expenditures in Iraq will have nearly doubled since the U.S. invasion, as the military confronts the rapidly escalating cost of repairing, rebuilding and replacing equipment chewed up by three years of combat.

The cost of the war in U.S. fatalities has declined this year, but the cost in treasure continues to rise, from $48 billion in 2003 to $59 billion in 2004 to $81 billion in 2005 to an anticipated $94 billion in 2006, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The U.S. government is now spending nearly $10 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan, up from $8.2 billion a year ago, a new Congressional Research Service report found.


Army Chief of Staff Peter J. Schoomaker told Congress that the Pentagon did not "have a good prediction about what our battle losses would be." (By Sarah L. Voisin -- The Washington Post)

Annual war costs in Iraq are easily outpacing the $61 billion a year that the United States spent in Vietnam between 1964 and 1972, in today's dollars. The invasion's "shock and awe" of high-tech laser-guided bombs, cruise missiles and stealth aircraft has long faded, but the costs of even those early months are just coming into view as the military confronts equipment repair and rebuilding costs it has avoided and procurement costs it never expected.

"We did not predict early on that we would have the number of electronic jammers that we've got. We did not predict we'd have as many armored vehicles that we have, nor did we have a good prediction about what our battle losses would be," Army Chief of Staff Peter J. Schoomaker recently told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/19/AR2006041902594.html

[Drum]

1. I guess they also "did not predict"

fighting a deserting army,
disbanding Iraq's military,
assembling a new Iraqi army,
paying to train this army,
and
leaving behind all of the equipment we've bought for our military for their use....

CONFOUNDING!

drum says: cut them off...i'm through paying for this crap. charity begins at home.

[Cassandra]

2. No one could have imagined...

having to buy weapons during a war. Asshole!

[saigon68]

3. Look at the Clueless asswipe in the photo above

With out nukes he'd have a tough time fighting his way out of a wet paper bag

[IChing]

4. You want to know who owns Congress? The top 100 money givers list.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2579068

"Defense"(war) industry examples of lobbying expenses.

GE. $94,130,000
Northrop Grumman Corp. $83,405,691
Edison Electric $82,000,000

[rodeodance]

5. n

[cosmicdot]

6. what was Army Chief of Staff Schoomaker doing at AEI?

(the curtain behind him)


http://www.aei.org/

the rightwing American Enterprise Institute
(Lynne Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, Lee "ExxonMobil" Raymond, etc.)

The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) is an extremely influential, pro-business right-wing think tank founded in 1943 by Lewis H. Brown. It promotes the advancement of free enterprise capitalism, and succeeds in placing its people in influential governmental positions. It is the center base for many neo-conservatives.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_Enterprise_Institute

People for the American Way summary
http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=4456

[november3rd]

7. Close the Pentagon

These "warriors" are destroying their own country. What Republican Saps.

[phantom power]

8. It's not the Pentagon, it's the civilian oversight: Bush, Rumsfeld, etc.

Goddamn, I never thought I'd hear myself say something like that. But these days it happens to be true.

[IChing]

9. the best congress money can buy

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2579068

[Inland]

10. Now, is Congress actually going to include this in "the budget"

so that it is counted in the deficit figures or is it going to be in a "supplemental" bill sprung on us in the fall?

[gratuitous]

11. Fighting a war, and they didn't expect to buy more guns and tanks?

Hell, even a pacifist like me knows you can't conduct a war without buying armaments. And the cost of the war has doubled since shock and awe. I don't know who could have predicted that (okay, me and about a million other people who marched in the streets in 2002 and 2003), but I know for a fact that if they thought about it way back when, they sure didn't tell the public about it.

As war crazed as Americans and our society are, official projections of a decades-long military engagement costing hundreds of billions of dollars a year might have given even some of the hawkiest of hawks pause.

[pinniped]

12. I can't think of a better way to blow away $10,000,000.00 a month....

since SS is secure and our health care system works like a finely tuned timepiece.