By Jim Lobe
Inter Press Service, 07 February 2006
WASHINGTON, Feb. 7, 2006 (IPS/GIN) -- While the Pentagon emerged as the big winner Monday among U.S. government agencies in next year's budget sweepstakes, its failure to choose among the threats it says it must defend the country against may prove costly in the long run, both financially and operationally, according to analysts here.
Although a major part of the proposed 7 percent increase in the Department of Defense's (DOD) budget is designed to boost its counter-insurgency and unconventional warfare capabilities for the "war on terror," the budget also includes significantly more money for the development and procurement of expensive new weapons systems to cope with potential future threats, particularly China.
The costs of doing both, however, are putting a major strain on the U.S. Treasury at a time when popular social spending is being cut back in the face of an anticipated record federal deficit next year.
"Rather than making some hard decisions about future weapons systems, the DOD has essentially deferred to long-standing service interests," said Carl Conetta, director of the Boston-based Project on Defense Alternatives (PDA), in reference to pet weapons projects of the different branches of the military.
"I think there's going to be a reckoning because, with the budget deficit, the rebuilding of New Orleans, the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan, the fact that (President) Bush wants to keep his tax cuts, something is going to have to give in the Pentagon budget over the next few years," warned William Hartung, a senior defense analyst at the World Policy Institute in New York.
Under Bush's proposed 2007 budget, the DOD will be allocated more than $440 billion, an amount that does not include an additional $120 billion the administration plans to spend on military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through next year.
Indeed, the Pentagon's 2007 budget may exceed the combined military spending of all other countries next year. In 2004, the last year for which statistics were available, Washington accounted for 47 percent of global military expenditures, which were just over $1 trillion, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
The new budget request calls for a 15 percent increase in the number of special-operations forces to some 66,000 by 2011. It followed last week's release of the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), a planning document that is supposed to show how strategic priorities are aligned with the agency's planned budgets and assets.
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Citation: Jim Lobe. "'Something Has to Give' in Pentagon Spending," Inter Press Service, 07 February 2006.
Original URL: http://www.blackenterprise.com/yb/ybopen.asp?section=ybng&story_id=89170890&ID=blackenterprise
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