Paying More, Buying Less

[unhappycamper]

Paying More, Buying Less
Winslow Wheeler | January 29, 2010

The new budget now being trotted out for the Pentagon is a tired old document, bereft of the many significant changes needed to revive our decaying defenses. Worse, the Pentagon's masters and its peanut galleries in Congress, the press, and think tanks opine delusions that anything significant is changing.

Much will be made of a few reluctant acknowledgements of reality. The Navy won't plan on, for now, a new cruiser it can't afford even under the wildest budget growth assumptions. The Army will continue redesigning the vehicles for its "system of system" target hunting technologies that we now know can't find even primitive enemies. The Air Force will have to wait, but just a bit, for a new bomber to try, yet again, to attack what it called decades ago "critical nodes." The Marine Corps will declare a return to its amphibious warfare heritage: to fight its way onto hostile shores -- something it has not done since 1945.

The new spending level for the Pentagon reinforces the non-change. At $708 billion, we will witness yet another year of "real growth:" a trajectory we have been on since 1999. As usual, we will be told that the increases are because we live in a dangerous world, as evidenced by the continuing, if not expanding, wars President Obama wants to fight directly or indirectly in at least five countries. We will also be told of the "austere" nature of the Pentagon budget for its spending back home; although it is the largest DOD money plan since 1946.

A dangerous world it may be, but significantly less so than the one we saw in the Cold War when we faced hundreds of Soviet divisions in Europe and tried to address unending brushfire -- or worse -- wars all over the world, least some new communist regime tip the scales of perceived balance against us. The relative calm we witness today, nonetheless results in an American defense budget that is today about $200 billion higher than the average Pentagon Cold War budget.

A new report from the Congressional Research Service now tells us that the Bush/Obama wars have cost just over $1 Trillion, but that is just 19 percent of the $5.3 Trillion spent by the Pentagon in the same period. The conflicts that impel the growth in the budget actually comprise only a fifth of its size.

Rest of article at: http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,209782,00.html?wh=news

[Vinnie From Indy]

1. America has gone insane

Eisenhower had it right in his famous speech about the military industrial complex.