By Steve Hynd
Bob Gates' speech yesterday has slipped entirely under Memeorandum's increasingly right-wing gossip laden radar, it seems. You'd think the Republicans would be up in arms about cancelled programs.
Amid growing calls for government spending cuts, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates unveiled Thursday a proposed five-year budget plan that would cut tens of thousands of troops from the Army and Marine Corps, eliminate two key weapons systems, and raise the cost of health insurance for some military retirees.
But, just like last year, Gates has cleverly wielded the axe on some programs but increased the overall defense budget by $40 billion on top of the whopping $513 billion the DoD spent last year - and that's not even including the supplementary spending needed to keep the two occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan going! Wherever something is cancelled or reduced, the money saved is being plowed back in to spending on some other aspect of the military/industrial machine.
(By the way, what's this in the press releases about a 3% increase? In raw dollars, it's more like 7.8%. Someone's doing some creative accounting.)
The budget Gates outlined would mark the 14th year in a row that Pentagon spending has increased. Pentagon spending has more than doubled in 10 years and is projected to rise to $620.2 billion by 2015; in fiscal year 2001, the defense budget was $291.2 billion. Adjusted for inflation, the Defense Department budget has risen 65 percent over the past decade.
Just about the only GOP old warhorse who is complaining is John McCain, but it's in a "get orf my lawrn" kinda way, more a kneejerk ruminant belch than anything serious. Hardly surprising. Last year's expenditure was equal to all of the next 25 countries defense spending put together and most of those are US allies.
To quote myselfshamelessly from last year: "As James Joyner reminds us, policy is what gets funded, the rest is just talk. The Obama administration is busily engaged in finding extra funding to pursue an inevitably interventionist policy objective." In that, Obama will no doubt gain the support of neoliberal interventionists like Matt Yglesias. As to plans to flatline the military budget by 2015...does anyone actually believe anymore that Obama and Gates will still be in office and able to make that stick? If so, I've got a bridge to sell you - at military contractor, no-bid, cost-plus rates of course.
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