How the Defense Industry is Hosing Obama and the Taxpayer ... Again

[another saigon]

http://counterpunch.com/spinney08162010.html

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Recommendation

We tried throwing money at the Pentagon to fix its problems twice in the last thirty years, in the 1980s and after 1998. It is now indisputably clear that these spending sprees created conditions that worsened the pathway toward the deliberately self-induced train wreck. Adding more money simply repeats the process on a more destructive scale. When such behavior repeats itself over and over, it inevitably boils down to another of Colonel Boyd’s aphorisms: “The issue is now reduced to a question of incompetence, corruption, or both.”

On the other hand, there is one thing the bipartisan report on the QDR inadvertently proves: It is now time to clean out the MICC’s Augean Stables.

We know what does not work: Adding money

The only real alternative is to take away the money, and force the MICC’s decision makers to think before they spend.

We should freeze the defense budget, or better yet, reduce it each year on a glide path of one or two or three (or more) percentage points per year in current dollars until the Pentagon can pass an audit that provides decision makers with enough reliable information to sort out the mess deliberately created by the MICC’s front loaders and political engineers. This is hardly an extreme requirement; accounting for money appropriated and expended is an absolute requirement of the Constitution (re. Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7), which every member of the federal government has taken a sacred oath to protect and preserve.

There are those who will howl that we cannot take such a drastic action in time of war.

This claim is a red herring that approves trashing the Constitution to defend a country defined by its Constitution. Moreover, even if we assume we want to continue pouring money into those unaccountable bottomless pits, we could continue the policy of throwing money at these wars with supplemental appropriations, while putting the core defense budget on a diet.

[zipplewrath]

1. The problem is the larger structure

The military is, and always has been, so deeply woven into the structure of our government, and our society, that it has become a huge defacto "social program". We educate children, on the government dime, in military acadamies. It is a path to college for innumerable young adults looking for ways to finance an education. It employs us in a large number of industries. It provides a retirement benefit for large numbers of citizens, health benefits as well. We are rapidly headed towards and economy, and associated culture, in which there are three industries, military, health care, and banking.

[another saigon]

2. I agree

and sadly with our economy in the shit, no one would dare challenge one of our only 'industries' that is thriving. It sucks to be an american.

:(

[zipplewrath]

3. And one of our last "high tech" areas

It's one of the few areas still doing advanced design, testing, analysis, and manufacturing. It' be nice if we could find a way to "civilianize" many of these industrial areas, without seeing them boxed up and shipped over seas.