Say bye bye to your tax dollars:
Pentagon to Seek $80 Billion More
Request to Help Finance
Iraq, Afghanistan Presence
Is Bigger Than Expected
By GREG JAFFE and JACKIE CALMES
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
December 14, 2004; Page A4
WASHINGTON -- Pentagon officials said they will ask the Bush administration for an additional $80 billion in emergency funding to help pay costs of the military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, slightly higher than the $70 billion to $75 billion many on Capitol Hill had expected.
Senior Pentagon officials met to review and finalize the new budget request before sending it to the White House this week. Administration budget officials are then expected to whittle it down a bit. One defense official said the final White House request, which will be submitted to Congress early next year, would probably come in between $75 billion and $80 billion, pushing the total military costs, since the Iraq war began, to well over $230 billion.
"The [Defense Department] request is on the higher side of our expectations," said an official involved in the process. "We are still sorting through it to figure out what the final number will be."
Another U.S. official said the total Pentagon request would likely be in the $80 billion to $89 billion range. The request comes on top of $25 billion that Congress approved in August to help tide the Pentagon over until it could make a larger supplemental request. The U.S. official said the Bush administration would like to keep the total request for the 2005 fiscal year under $100 billion, including the $25 billion bridge funding.
Predicting the long-range military costs in Iraq is a difficult proposition. Senior Pentagon officials would like to reduce the U.S. troop presence in 2005 and turn more of the daily security in Iraq over to Iraqis. Recently, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he believed it was possible for U.S. troops to finish their job in Iraq in the next four years.
It is unlikely that Congress, following the controversy over the lack of armor for U.S. humvees, would balk at spending for troops in Iraq or Afghanistan.
One reason for the higher-than-expected request is the larger U.S. troop presence in Iraq. The current plan is to keep about 150,000 soldiers in Iraq through the spring, and the majority of the supplemental request goes to keeping those troops in Iraq. The intense pace of military operations in Iraq has also caused equipment to age faster than expected, driving up costs.
Finally, the Army is getting a large chunk of the supplemental money to help increase the number of deployable brigades in the force to 43 from the current 33. The additional brigades will help ease the military burden in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Last fall, Congress passed an emergency-spending measure of $87.5 billion that included $65 billion for combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with about $18.6 billion for Iraqi reconstruction. The $87.5 billion request took many senior Republican lawmakers, who expected a much smaller amount, by surprise. Most of the Iraq reconstruction money hasn't been spent yet because of the increasingly disruptive insurgency. |
