Where is the Payoff for Huge Pentagon Budget Hikes?

[ensho]

http://counterpunch.com/


Smaller, Older and Less Prepared


Since 2001, Congress has given the Pentagon more than $1 trillion to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over the same period, Congress and the Pentagon have added a second trillion dollars to the nonwar (base) part of the Pentagon budget.

You'd think all that added money would give us larger forces, a newer hardware inventory and better trained people. Instead, the windfall made our forces smaller, older and less ready to fight.

-snip-

At $707 billion, the defense budget is today higher than it has ever been since the end of World War II. That statement has been true since 2007; under the Gates plan, it will remain so out to the year 2020 if war spending stays constant.

This spending level is unrelated to the military threat.

-snip-

What did the Pentagon and Congress do with this trillion-dollar windfall? The Navy budget received an additional $293 billion, 2011 funding increased over 2000 by 44 percent. Yet the size of the Navy's combat fleet dropped from 318 ships and submarines to 287, a decline of 10 percent.

-snip-

(Our aircraft are older than our ships.)

-snip-
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so who is eating up our money? whose pockets getting filled?

snake cheney's shadow govt.?

the pentagon needs some deep cleaning out by an outside source.

[ensho]

1. kicking back to pg. 1

the pentagon has got away with theft long enought - time to change that

[w8liftinglady]

2. kicking right there with you.

[classysassy]

3. That sacred cow

AKA, the defense budget no longer produce milk so she should be replaced,a younger cow with fresh milk without her bull should be put in place.

[leftstreet]

4. Every US citizen should join the military next Wednesday

Housing, healthcare, jobs

!!

They'd have to cover us

[Statistical]

5. The Navy may be smaller but older and less capable hardly.

Personally I think Navy spending should decline BUT the author makes claim that Navy is older and less capable without any support.

The Navy fleet size did shrink but ships are far more capable. Not just new ship designs but retrofits. Vertical Launch Missle Systems being installed on a wide range of Navy ships are a significant upgrade. Nearly useless deck guns are replaced by the ability to launch up to a dozen missiles simultaneously at threats.

The first salvo capabilities of these vessels has increased by a magnitude.

So the author makes a lot of claims but doesn't really back it up. Our planes are old but aerospace doesn't change that radically from year to year. The radar, avionics, computers, guidance systems, and armaments have radically improved over last 20 years so while it is "the same old plane" it isn't. An F/A-18 might be a 30 year old airframe the F/A-18D is far superior in every possible way to the first gen (F/A-18A) so much so that a squadron of F/A-18As would have a hope of prevailing in an engagement with it's "D" variant brothers despite it being "the same ole plane".

Should US defense spending be reduced? Sure.
If the article a bunch of circumstantial BS? Yup.