Cut the Military Budget
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| Fri, 02-13-2009 - 10:02am |
From part 2.....
>"Sadly, self-described centrist and even liberal organizations often talk about the need to curtail deficits by cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other programs that have a benign social purpose, but they fail to talk about one area where substantial budget reductions would have the doubly beneficial effect of cutting the deficit and diminishing expenditures that often do more harm than good. Obviously people should be concerned about the $700 billion Congress voted for this past fall to deal with the credit crisis. But even if none of that money were to be paid back--and most of it will be--it would involve a smaller drain on taxpayer dollars than the Iraq War will have cost us by the time it is concluded, and it is roughly equivalent to the $651 billion we will spend on all defense in this fiscal year."<
>"Current plans call for us not only to spend hundreds of billions more in Iraq but to continue to spend even more over the next few years producing new weapons that might have been useful against the Soviet Union. Many of these weapons are technological marvels, but they have a central flaw: no conceivable enemy. It ought to be a requirement in spending all this money for a weapon that there be some need for it. In some cases we are developing weapons--in part because of nothing more than momentum--that lack not only a current military need but even a plausible use in any foreseeable future."<
Article at....... http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090302/frank?rel=hp_picks
From part 1...
>"In September the Army Times reported that the Pentagon was preparing to box the new president in to a major increase in military spending by drawing up a budget before the election had been decided. The number it eventually leaked was $584 billion, a whopping increase of $68.6 billion over last year. It was kind of like telling the new boss that your old boss had already agreed to give you a $100,000 raise. In any other context, the sheer hubris would get you fired or laughed out of the room.
But the Pentagon budget is ruled by the appropriations equivalent of quantum physics, in which the normal rules of constraint do not apply. We still don't know how much the Obama administration is planning to give the Pentagon--the announcement of the number has been postponed--but reports indicate the number will likely be $527 billion, around an 8 percent increase instead of the 12 percent the Pentagon requested."<
Article at...... http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090302/100_days
"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience ... In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic process."
-- President Dwight Eisenhower, farewell speech to the nation, January 17, 1961
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."
-- Dwight Eisenhower, April 16, 1953




It's not like the military does anything, or like we need it, right?
Certainly the U.S. military hasn't liberated tens of millions this century and hundreds of millions the last ... ohh wait, it has, my bad.
Seems that Gates has ideas about cutting the defence budget.
Can Robert Gates Tame the Pentagon?
Complete article... http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1879176,00.html
If you are a firm believer in the war in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert Gates' grim assessment last month of what lies in store for the U.S. might have made you shudder. "If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose, because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience and money, to be honest," he said.
But if you are a defense contractor who has enjoyed a decade of bottomless Pentagon funding, it was Gates' comments about a struggle much closer to home that are keeping you up at night. "The spigot of defense spending that opened on 9/11 is closing," he said. "With two major campaigns ongoing, the economic crisis and resulting budget pressures will force hard choices on this department."
Gates, the U.S.'s 22nd Defense Secretary, has declared a low-key war against the military services and the way they develop and buy the weapons they use to defend the nation. Up until now, he has done that mostly by jawboning: The U.S. can't "eliminate national-security risks through higher defense budgets, to do everything and buy everything," Gates says in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. That futile quest has led to weapons that "have grown ever more baroque, have become ever more costly, are taking longer to build and are being fielded in ever dwindling quantities."
The Air Force
Gates' first showdown looms with a $350 million--a--pop fighter jet. He has to decide by March 1 whether to add more F-22 Raptor fighters to the 183 purchased by the Bush Administration. For years, the Air Force has wanted to double the fleet, while Gates has made clear that he thinks 183 is sufficient. A month ago, some Air Force officials were saying privately that maybe 60 more F-22s would suffice. The Pentagon's acquisition boss, John Young, recently detailed why more F-22s might be a poor investment. The F-22s that exist are ready to fly only 62% of the time and haven't met most of their performance goals. "The airplane is proving very expensive to operate, not seeing the mission-capable rates we expected, and it's complex to maintain," Young said. Besides, he added, the Air Force plans on spending $8 billion to upgrade most of the F-22s it already has.
Gates has tangled with the Air Force before. Shortly after arriving at the Pentagon in late 2006, he pushed to boost production of unmanned aircraft for use in intelligence work, only to run into the Air Force's long-standing love of manned fighters. But Gates' hunch was vindicated in Afghanistan and Iraq, where cheaper, unmanned Predator and Reaper drones have been flying around the clock but expensive F-22s have yet to appear. Air Force Major General Charles Dunlap Jr. has written that drones are "game-changing" because of their unprecedented ability to loiter for hours, waiting for the enemy to reveal himself--and then kill him with their weapons. And yet Dunlap's service remains wedded to white scarves, cockpits and all their inherent limitations.
The Navy
Gates hasn't torpedoed anything that belongs to the Navy--yet. But its $100 billion plan to buy a new fleet of 100,000-ton aircraft carriers (and the ships and subs to defend them) is a tempting target. That's a huge investment in gigantic ships that are increasingly vulnerable to long-range missiles--and even pirates or terrorists in a dinghy. At the heart of the debate is whether the Navy can make do with the 281 ships it has or needs to grow about 10%, to 313 ships. Gates has good reason to be skeptical. The Navy's "battle fleet is still larger than the next 13 navies combined," he recently noted. "And 11 of those 13 navies are U.S. allies or partners."
A smarter option, the study suggests, is to build a Navy of many smaller and simpler ships, which would complicate enemy targeting and give U.S. commanders better intelligence. Nonetheless, the Navy has just begun spending $11 billion to design and build the first in a new class of carriers, the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, scheduled to join the fleet in 2015.
The Army
Gates' final target is on land. The Army is getting $160 billion to outfit a third of its force with a complex network of electronically linked vehicles, beginning in 2015. This supposedly synchronized web of vehicles is called the Future Combat Systems (FCS) and would include tanks, troop carriers and unmanned aircraft ostensibly knit together in a computerized cavalry. The Army likes to argue that the FCS is a transformational approach to fighting wars, in part because it is giving up a lot of armor in favor of some 95 million lines of computer code designed to detect and avoid enemy fire. In theory, all this technology would give combat GIs the ability to destroy the enemy from far away.
That's the idea, anyway. In fact, there are serious questions about the FCS. Only two of its 44 key technologies are mature enough to generate reliable cost estimates, according to the Government Accountability Office. The Army has so far spent $18 billion trying to get the FCS to work and plans on spending $21 billion more before it gets a formal green light for production in 2013, when key performance tests still will not have been done. And the FCS's vaunted mobility has already been scrapped; the Army has abandoned plans to transport all those vehicles to the battlefield aboard C-130 cargo planes because they are too heavy. Costs are on the rise as well: the Army was able to keep the FCS's total price tag at $160 billion only by killing four of the program's 18 platforms in 2007--and is likely to continue cutting them to keep down the expense.
The bigger question is whether such a high-tech approach to war makes sense after the U.S. learned that getting soldiers out of their vehicles and mixing among the locals was a key to turning Iraq around. Weapons designed to kill from afar may not be best for counterinsurgencies, in which intelligence is most often gleaned only by personal contact. General Peter Chiarelli, the Army's No. 2 officer, disputes the idea that FCS "is a Cold War relic." But not everyone agrees.