Obama Demands $60 Billion in Savings From Military Fighting Two Wars
standard blog
By Michael Goldfarb
This is the same Barack Obama who asked the entire federal government to come up with $100 million in savings over the next year and couldn't deliver on deadline. Yet the military, actively engaged in two hot wars and fighting a global war on terror, or counterinsurgency, or contingency operation, or whatever the euphemism of the day is, will be asked to cut six hundred times as much in order to "pay for new priorities to be set by the Defense secretary, a top Pentagon official said Tuesday," according to the latest report from CQ's Josh Rogin:
>>> The order from Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is based on an assumption that there will be no real growth in defense budgets over the next five years, a radical departure for a department whose budgets have increased more than 80 percent since 2001....
One of the driving factors so far in the evaluation is the prospect that defense budgets largely will be static in fiscal 2011 through fiscal 2015, said David Ochmanek, deputy assistant secretary of defense for force transformation and resources.
The military services must “find offsets” to make room for the new capabilities that Gates wants to add or expand, he said. “They’re now busily looking for those billpayers,” said Ochmanek. “That’s how the zero growth assumption manifests itself.”<<<
Zero growth for our troops. Zero growth for the defense of our country. And all the while, ballooning deficits to pay for health care, stimulus spending, car companies, and a $20 million dollar vacation home on Martha's Vineyard. Republicans are busy fending off ObamaCare (and having some success), but I suspect that when the dust settles on all Obama's domestic initiatives, and assuming there is at least some marginal economic recovery over the next 18 months, this gutting of our nation's military may well be the most fertile ground for Republicans in the midterm election -- and in 2012. |
