Does Congress Even Know Where Pentagon Money Is Going?
Where is all the money flowing to the Pentagon going?
At Counterpunch, Winslow K. Wheeler, who worked on Capitol Hill for 31 years and the GAO specializing in national security affairs, writes an insightful article on that subject.
Here are a few excerpts: "It is now conventional wisdom to say that the Pentagon budget is higher in “real” dollars than at any point since the end of World War II. The $635 billion appropriated in fiscal year 2007 is $31 billion, or 5 percent, above the previous high water mark, 1952 at $604 billion. 2008 will be higher still at about $670 billion, and 2009 will likely be more again.
"What is not conventional wisdom - but should be - is that at today’s historic high level of spending, our military forces are smaller than they have ever been since the end of World War II; equipment is – on average – older than it ever has been before, and key elements of our most important fighting forces are not fully prepared for combat. Recently, the addition of substantial additional sums of money – separate from the additional funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – have made things not better, but worse.
"Important basic data not included in the Greenbook are the numbers that comprise the force structure of US Armed Forces....However, no one publishes the data in a reliable manner in annual increments for the post-World War II period for the key military forces; what data that are available from then to now jump from one way of counting the “beans” to another. There is no apples-to-apples, comparable set of numbers that reliably show the changes over time.
"Therefore, a simple – even simplistic – analysis that tracks the budgets of the military services (readily available from the Greenbook) together with the annual force structure of the Army, Navy, and Air Force is not easy to put together. Unless, that is, if you consult a remarkable analysis by Franklin C. Spinney, “Defense Death Spiral,” put together in the late 1990s and available at http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/defense_death_spiral/contents.htm.
"Its conclusion - that America’s defense forces have been shrinking, aging, and becoming less ready to fight, at increasing cost – is unassailable.
"The problem is that Spinney’s briefing is now several years old. It does not include two important subsequent developments: 1) the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the additional money appropriated for them, along with the additional stress the wars have imposed on the people and equipment in our armed forces, and 2) the additional funding that has been put into the Pentagon’s budget, other than what has been spent in Iraq and Afghanistan. One would hope that, despite the human and material stress of the wars, the fundamentally negative trends Spinney found in the1990s would have been ameliorated.
"However, the increase in non-war spending since 2001 has been significantly larger than the 40 percent cited above. Both the military services and Congress have crammed non-war spending into the “war” supplementals that have been enacted each year since 2002.
Mr. Wheeler's conclusion: "almost three quarters of a trillion dollars over has been added above the level of Defense Department spending planned just before George W. Bush was inaugurated; none of it has been specified for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; it is a “peacetime” addition to the defense budget. One would hope that it has been used effectively to address the problems – the shrinking, the aging, the reduced readiness – that Spinney identified.
"But it has not; the added money has not reversed these trends, some of which are now significantly worse."
Check out the article. It's an informative read.
At Counterpunch, Winslow K. Wheeler, who worked on Capitol Hill for 31 years and the GAO specializing in national security affairs, writes an insightful article on that subject.
Here are a few excerpts: "It is now conventional wisdom to say that the Pentagon budget is higher in “real” dollars than at any point since the end of World War II. The $635 billion appropriated in fiscal year 2007 is $31 billion, or 5 percent, above the previous high water mark, 1952 at $604 billion. 2008 will be higher still at about $670 billion, and 2009 will likely be more again.
"What is not conventional wisdom - but should be - is that at today’s historic high level of spending, our military forces are smaller than they have ever been since the end of World War II; equipment is – on average – older than it ever has been before, and key elements of our most important fighting forces are not fully prepared for combat. Recently, the addition of substantial additional sums of money – separate from the additional funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – have made things not better, but worse.
"Important basic data not included in the Greenbook are the numbers that comprise the force structure of US Armed Forces....However, no one publishes the data in a reliable manner in annual increments for the post-World War II period for the key military forces; what data that are available from then to now jump from one way of counting the “beans” to another. There is no apples-to-apples, comparable set of numbers that reliably show the changes over time.
"Therefore, a simple – even simplistic – analysis that tracks the budgets of the military services (readily available from the Greenbook) together with the annual force structure of the Army, Navy, and Air Force is not easy to put together. Unless, that is, if you consult a remarkable analysis by Franklin C. Spinney, “Defense Death Spiral,” put together in the late 1990s and available at http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/defense_death_spiral/contents.htm.
"Its conclusion - that America’s defense forces have been shrinking, aging, and becoming less ready to fight, at increasing cost – is unassailable.
"The problem is that Spinney’s briefing is now several years old. It does not include two important subsequent developments: 1) the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the additional money appropriated for them, along with the additional stress the wars have imposed on the people and equipment in our armed forces, and 2) the additional funding that has been put into the Pentagon’s budget, other than what has been spent in Iraq and Afghanistan. One would hope that, despite the human and material stress of the wars, the fundamentally negative trends Spinney found in the1990s would have been ameliorated.
"However, the increase in non-war spending since 2001 has been significantly larger than the 40 percent cited above. Both the military services and Congress have crammed non-war spending into the “war” supplementals that have been enacted each year since 2002.
Mr. Wheeler's conclusion: "almost three quarters of a trillion dollars over has been added above the level of Defense Department spending planned just before George W. Bush was inaugurated; none of it has been specified for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; it is a “peacetime” addition to the defense budget. One would hope that it has been used effectively to address the problems – the shrinking, the aging, the reduced readiness – that Spinney identified.
"But it has not; the added money has not reversed these trends, some of which are now significantly worse."
Check out the article. It's an informative read.
Comments