The Pentagon Budget Battle's Ratcheting Rhetoric

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It has been plain to anyone paying attention for the past couple of years that military spending – or "security" spending ... – has to come down ... defining what we think of as "defense spending" as "security spending" – as the Administration is now doing – makes sense. That's because it includes the additional $200 billion or so we spend annually on homeland security, veterans, and nuclear weapons – items that are routinely folded into most other nations' defense budgets.

We have never done that, and it gives us a shrunken figure for military spending that doesn't serve citizens well. It also makes apples-to-apples comparisons difficult because such nomenclature has rarely been used before. That's in part why the Administration did it. It has also become a way for the Pentagon to suggest recently that future cuts will slice deeper into those non-Pentagon – but very much defense-related – accounts than their own cherished programs.

But here is the key fact:

We are being forced to throttle back military spending by our own profound lack of money. We're going to end up doing the right thing, but for the wrong reason. We need to rationalize defense spending based on the threats the nation currently faces.

...

On Thursday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta – in his first briefing as defense chief – said the additional "doomsday" cuts built in to the debt-reduction deal, absent an additional agreement on where to cut elsewhere, would be "very dangerous." The military faces some $350 billion in cuts in its projected rate of growth under the budget pact Obama signed into law last week. But if a panel of lawmakers fails to hammer out additional savings, some $500 billion or more would be guillotined from the Pentagon. Panetta made it clear that additional cuts should come from increased taxes or Social Security and Medicare instead.

...

Panetta's prescription is a recipe for the U.S. to continue spending as much on its military as the rest of the world combined, pretty much forever:

We face a broad and growing range of security threats and challenges that our military must be prepared to confront, from terrorist networks to rogue nations that are making efforts to obtain a nuclear capability, to dealing with rising powers that always look at us to determine whether or not we will, in fact, maintain a strong defense here and throughout the world.

...

Contrary to what Panetta and others tell us, we are not facing an avalanche of threats that require us to spend more money now than we did during the Cold War. We are safer now than we have been in our lifetimes, yet the public discourse – largely funded by those who stand to gain by continued plundering of the national weal – continually asserts otherwise.

http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2011/08/08/the-pentagon-budget-battles-ratcheting-rhetoric/

[luckytxn 2,264]

Bring the troops that are spread out worldwide home NOW.