There has been a lot of hand-wringing of late about budget cuts undermining America’s Defense capabilities. Google the term “budget cuts undermine military” and you’ll come up with 2,970,000 results. That is a LOT of hand-wringing.
Is it possible that the situation isn’t nearly as dire as we have been led to believe? That the military-industrial complex that towers over the rest of the world’s combined military might might just be able to squeeze by?
Hell, yes, it’s possible. But even if you’re highly skeptical of Pentagon pronouncements, you might be staggered to learn just how off-base the House of War’s numbers are. Winslow Wheeler, who has been doing this for more than three decades, does what no one in the papers of record could be bothered to do: see if the Pentagon’s numbers add up.
And .. are you ready? They. Don’t.
His conclusion is a pretty good question.
After all the chatter, some of it still quite hysterical, about “defense cuts,” I find no cut; I find “defense spending” (defined generically) going up by $8.2 billion, from $986.1 billion to $994.3 billion.
Given the rhetoric we hear out of Washington about “devastating” cuts that fail “to adequately address threats” you have to wonder how much more than $1 trillion do these people want to spend?
A footnote: It’s slightly a case of apples and oranges, but for some time the War Resisters’ League has been pointing out the vast disparity between what the Government says and what it does in its “Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes” pie chart.