military spending soars, security suffer
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| Tue, 03-02-2004 - 2:21pm |
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - More than one-fifth of the proposed 2005 United States military budget could be cut and the money spent on projects that would better protect the nation's security, according to a task force report released Monday. Overall, the steep increases in US defense budgets under President George W Bush have largely failed to strengthen US security since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, adds the study, written by nine national-security experts.
The report charges that some of the most expensive items in the budget have little or nothing to do with the threats the US confronts in the world today, and calls for a much more integrated approach to determining defense priorities that would include non-military - such as economic assistance and peacekeeping - as well as strictly military programs.
The report, "A Unified Security Budget for the United States", concludes that some US$51 billion of the proposed $230 billion 2005 budget could be saved by reallocating funding within military accounts, while the savings could be used on non-military initiatives that could substantially boost overall security.
"Cutting the Comanche program was a good start," said Marcus Corbin, a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information (CDI), citing one weapon the administration has already said it will cut.
"But our report identifies 10 other programs, including the F-22 fighter and DDX destroyer, that could be safely cut or reconfigured to free up resources for other neglected security priorities, such as diplomatic operations, weapons of mass destruction non-proliferation and port container inspection," he said.
The 23-page report, co-sponsored by CDI, Project for Defense Alternatives (PDA), the Center for Arms Control and Proliferation (CACP), and Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF), among others, comes amid growing public concern over build up of unprecedented fiscal deficits and the impact on them of the rapidly rising defense budget.
From 2000 to 2004, the Pentagon's budget ballooned by more than 50 percent, bringing it to a level comparable to that of the world's next 25 biggest military spenders combined, according to the CACP. Moreover, its current proposal for 2005 does not include expenditures for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the Pentagon is spending nearly $70 billion this year alone.
With Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan warning recently that future social security benefits might have to be cut, many lawmakers, including Republicans, are insisting that no program should be immune from reductions.
In mid-February, House of Representatives speaker Dennis Hastert declared all parts of the budget "on the table" for cuts, including the military, a statement that apparently contributed to the Pentagon's decision to abruptly cancel the army's long-running Comanche helicopter program.
In that light, the task force, which also included defense experts at Citizens for Global Solutions, the Center for American Progress, the Friends Committee on National Legislation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called for a major reassessment of other expensive weapons systems, whose usefulness in the "war on terrorism" and other likely security challenges is highly questionable.
The nature of today's threats, says the report, should, among other things, permit the Pentagon to reduce the pace of investment in the next generation of conventional weapons, such as fighters, helicopters, ships, submarines and tanks, where Washington already enjoys a substantial technological edge over any conceivable adversary. Most of these weapons were designed for war against the Soviet Union.
In addition, the report calls for stopping deployment of the national missile defense (NMD) system until the technology is proven. "So far, despite spending $75 billion, we have not found any that works, and we cannot plan our security around doing so," it says, noting that NMD is the single biggest item in the 2005 defense budget.
The report also calls for reducing the US strategic nuclear arsenal, closing unnecessary military bases, and overhauling the Pentagon's financial management operations. If these steps are taken, as much as $56 billion could be saved in 2005 alone, according to the report.
Some of those savings should be used for other military priorities, like buying improved flak jackets and body armor for US troops in hostile or combat environments, or realigning US forces to better prepare them for likely missions, like counter-terrorism, peacekeeping and stability and reconstruction operations, which are particularly relevant to US efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The report suggests that such efforts could cost around $5 billion annually.
But the administration and Congress also need urgently to adopt a more comprehensive approach to security and fighting terrorism, the report adds. "Despite the administration's promises of a comprehensive approach to fighting terrorism, its budget concentrates seven times as many resources on the military as on all non-military security tools combined, including homeland security," according to Miriam Pemberton, FPIF's peace and security editor.
In particular, the report calls for reallocating some $6 billion to strengthen key non-military programs, including diplomacy, international communication and non-proliferation projects, such as the Nunn-Lugar initiative to help fund disarmament in Russia and to find alternative employment for its weapons and nuclear scientists.
In addition, the administration and Congress should consider sharply increasing development assistance for poor nations by as much as $10 billion a year in order to address much of the hopelessness and despair that can breed terrorism over time, particularly in so-called "failed states".
The report notes that Bush spoke eloquently on the link between development assistance and security at an international conference in Mexico in 2002, but has subsequently failed to push Congress into appropriating the funds.
Finally, the report calls for increases in homeland security funding similar to those recommended by a 2003 Council on Foreign Relations Task Force. More money for emergency first-responders, including local police and fire departments and port security, should both be treated urgently, it suggests.
"Currently we are wasting large sums on the wrong forces for the wrong occasions," the report concluded. "It is a mistake to believe that increasing the Pentagon budget alone will guarantee our safety."

Moreover, its current proposal for 2005 does not include expenditures for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the Pentagon is spending nearly $70 billion this year alone.
In addition, the report calls for stopping deployment of the national missile defense (NMD) system until the technology is proven. "So far, despite spending $75 billion, we have not found any that works, and we cannot plan our security around doing so," it says, noting that NMD is the single biggest item in the 2005 defense budget.
The report also calls for reducing the US strategic nuclear arsenal, closing unnecessary military bases, and overhauling the Pentagon's financial management operations. If these steps are taken, as much as $56 billion could be saved in 2005 alone, according to the report.
Good grief!
ITA, however, there are senators who want to safeguard jobs in their states. The corps in the military industry have very carefully distributed their facililty to various states. These projects are wasteful, dangerous, but well protected.
Bush's Latest Missile-Defense Folly
Why spend billions on a system that might never work?
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, March 12, 2004, at 2:48 PM PT
Forces are finally converging for a genuine debate on President Bush's missile-defense program. The Republican-controlled Congress is looking for ways to cut $9 billion from the military budget (which, at $420 billion, is getting unmanageable even for hawkish tastes). It's becoming painfully clear that rogues and terrorists are more likely to attack us with planes and trains than with nuclear missiles. And a recent series of technical studies—bolstered on Thursday by a high-profile Senate hearing—has dramatized just how difficult, if not impossible, this project is going to be.
Bush's budget for next year includes $10.7 billion for missile defense—over twice as much money as for any other single weapons system. This summer, he's planning to start deploying the first components of an MD system—six anti-missile missiles in Alaska, four in California, and as many as 20 more, in locations not yet chosen, the following year.
Yet, except by sheer luck, these interceptors will not be able to shoot down enemy missiles. Or, to put it more precisely, Bush is starting to deploy very expensive weapons without the slightest bit of evidence that they have any chance of working.
In the past six years of flight tests, here is what the Pentagon's missile-defense agency has demonstrated: A missile can hit another missile in mid-air as long as a) the operators know exactly where the target missile has come from and where it's going; b) the target missile is flying at a slower-than-normal speed; c) it's transmitting a special beam that exaggerates its radar signature, thus making it easier to track; d) only one target missile has been launched; and e) the "attack" happens in daylight.
Beyond that, the program's managers know nothing—in part because they have never run a test that goes beyond this heavily scripted (it would not be too strong to call it "rigged") scenario.
It's as if some kid were to hit a baseball thrown by a pitching machine straight down the middle at 30 mph and, on the basis of that feat, claimed he could hit whatever Mark Prior might throw him from a real mound, pitch after pitch after pitch, without fail.
There is, in other words, a vast distance between the Pentagon's current level of testing and the level that would need to be done before anyone could begin to claim that a missile-defense system might shoot down real enemy missiles in a real nuclear attack.
The latest annual report by Thomas Christie, the Pentagon's director of operational testing and evaluation, reveals just how incalculably vast this distance is. (The report was published with no fanfare at the end of last year and has appeared on private Web sites—but not the Pentagon's—in the past two weeks.)
Christie's bottom line is that we're rushing into this thing blind. Assessments of the system's capabilities are based primarily on "modeling and simulations" or on canned tests of "components and sub-systems," not on "operational tests of a mature, integrated system." Nothing can be reliably inferred from these data, because we don't know enough about the actual system that might be built and, therefore, don't know whether it bears any resemblance to the simulations. Or, as Christie puts it: "Due to the immature nature of the systems they emulate, models and simulations cannot be adequately validated at this time."
Step back and look at what a missile-defense system would involve. Broadly speaking, it would be a meshing of six separate operations: 1) an early warning radar, which would detect a missile launch; 2) satellite-based sensors that would distinguish missiles from deliberate decoys and random space clutter; 3) X-band radar that would track the missiles and control the firing of "kill vehicles" (anti-missile missiles that would shoot down enemy missiles); 4) the kill vehicles themselves; 5) booster rockets to launch the kill vehicles; and 6) the automated command-control-communications network that would connect all the above into a seamless system.
The anti-missile missiles that Bush plans to deploy later this year are the simplest elements of this system. Yet, Christie notes, they aren't ready for prime time, either—or, as he puts it, their development has been "hindered" by several shortcomings. There is currently no deployable rocket to boost them into space. Sensors, which would guide the kill vehicles to their targets, are not placed in the most optimal locations. (In the tests to date, a "transmitter" has been attached to the target, making it easy for radars to track.) A ship-based radar, which would be more flexible, won't be ready even for testing until, as Christie delicately puts it, "the post-2005 time-frame."
In general, Christie writes, kill vehicles need to be tested "at higher closing velocities and against targets with signatures, counter-measures , and flight dynamics more closely matching the projected threat." For now, he continues, "the small number of tests would limit confidence" in the performance of the system—or, for that matter, of any component in the system.
For many of these components, tests will not be ready for a while. The upgraded version of the Patriot air-defense missile, known as PAC-3, has shown "shortcomings" in operational testing. Further tests are scheduled—three this year, 12 next year, five in 2006, and seven in 2007—but, Christie notes, "the adequacy of this testing cannot be fully assessed because detailed objectives for most of the tests ... are not yet defined." In other words, the program managers not only haven't yet tested the missile; they haven't yet figured out what they need to test. Ditto for the vital Space Tracking Surveillance System. "The full capabilities of STSS," Christie writes, "cannot be tested until ... 2006 and 2008."
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is not exactly stepping into gear. In the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings on Thursday, Sen. Carl Levin, the panel's ranking Democrat, pointed out that seven of the eight flight tests scheduled for 2003 and 2004 have been canceled or delayed until next year.
The trade publication Aerospace Daily reports today that the Airborne Laser—a program that involves attaching a kill laser to a modified Boeing 747—is suffering major cost overruns (its $3 billion budget over the next five years is soaring to $5 billion), and its first tests, once scheduled for December 2004, have been pushed back to the middle of next year at the earliest.
Here's the question smacking us all in the face, proponents and opponents alike: How much are we willing to spend, over how long a period of time, not to build an effective missile-defense system but just to discover whether such a thing is feasible?
The Pentagon plans to spend at least another $50 billion over the next five years—through about the time when the Space Tracking Surveillance System will just be starting its tests (in other words, not just well before the system is ready for action but well before we'll have discovered whether it will ever be ready). If at the end of the day we ended up with an effective defense against missiles, it would almost certainly be worth the cost. But in fact, we might discover that it isn't feasible after all.
Already, the $10.7 billion that Bush is spending for fiscal year 2005 is more than the entire U.S. Army is spending on research and development. More to the point, it's nearly twice as much as the Department of Homeland Security is spending on customs and border patrol.
The world poses a "spectrum of threats," as strategists like to say, and there's only so much money to deal with them. Where should we focus our attention and resources: on tangible, present-day threats that can be addressed by means that don't involve bumping up against the laws of physics—or on hypothetical threats of the future that this administration is trying to defeat with technology that might never get out of the lab?
http://slate.msn.com/id/2097087/
Please let sanity win over lobbists pressures.
Please let sanity win over lobbists pressures.