theft of food from the mouths of the children of our men & women in uniform(for this non-related BS)is a crime against us all!
WorldNet Daily
IN THE MILITARY
Non-defense items
clog Defense budget:
Breast cancer research, marijuana eradication,
black college aid, Native American health care
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By Jon E. Dougherty
© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com
An "incestuous relationship" between the administration and civilians appointed to "key positions throughout the Pentagon" has enabled the Clinton-Gore White House to quietly shift hundreds of millions of dollars of the defense budget to fund favorite non-military social, health and research programs -- one of the biggest such line items being $175 million for breast-cancer research -- according to a high-ranking Pentagon official.
In fact, for the last seven years, the administration has altered the Defense Department's budget in such a way as to increase non-defense-related spending, while giving the appearance that the overall defense budget has not decreased, say defense analysts.
"The Pentagon's key positions are filled with former Democratic staffers from Capitol Hill," said a key Pentagon official who asked not to be identified in this report, noting that Defense Secretary William Cohen, a former Republican senator, is "just a figurehead who has no idea what's going on" inside the department.
Ivan Eland, director of defense policy studies for the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, agrees, and takes the point a step further. In addition to major non-military items in the defense budget, the Pentagon -- through political patronage -- is also filled with defense-related items that service branches don't want and that the Department of Defense doesn't need, says Eland. Often, he adds, those items are bought while other more pressing line items go unfunded or under-funded.
"Besides the now-famous breast cancer funding everyone always brings up, there are other items -- C-130s, F-15s, and amphibious ships -- that the Pentagon doesn't want, but that lawmakers add into the budget anyway," Eland says.
Has such spending increased or decreased over the last decade?
"It definitely has increased," says Eland. "People try to relate these items to national security ... because they're much more likely to get funding for them," but in reality, he said, they contribute little to overall military readiness.
"There are pockets of non-readiness throughout the military," Eland said, because much of the Pentagon's budget has gone towards unnecessary weapons systems and non-military defense items.
Because the Defense Department's budget has remained fairly constant for the past several years, it "might appear as though we're spending just as much on the military as ever before," said the Pentagon source.
Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore has made such contentions, maintaining that the Pentagon's budget has gone towards alleviating manpower, equipment and spare parts shortages. Defense Department and Senate Armed Services Committee reports, however, refute those claims.
"Although U.S. military forces remain fundamentally sound and capable, aging equipment, spare parts shortfalls, manning and experience gaps continue to manifest themselves in terms of declining mission capable rates and decreasing readiness ratings in some units," says the Senate Armed Services Committee's markup summary for the National Defense Authorization Bill of 2001.
At the beginning of the Kosovo operation, the Army was short of qualified pilots to fly the Apache helicopter gunships needed to protect ground troops.
"The pace of contingency operations continues to stress the readiness of certain segments of the force," adds the Department of Defense Quarterly Readiness Report to Congress, measuring the October-December 1999 timeframe.
"Most troubling are indications that problems are emerging in the readiness of forward deployed and first-to-fight units," the Senate markup summary report says, noting that the Armed Services Committee added $1.5 billion to address "key readiness programs, including ammunition, spare parts, equipment maintenance and training funds."
Gore's claims were also disputed by the Defense official who spoke to WorldNetDaily, who noted that the extra non-defense expenditures were all contributing to the findings in congressional and defense-review reports.
"One year, [former Colorado Democratic Rep.] Patsy Schroeder was padding all kinds of health research and development, as well as [other] health programs," making the Defense Department "the leading research agency for HIV."
Administration and Pentagon staffers can then say, "'We haven't decreased defense spending,'" the official said, "but they've changed what Defense does -- and now it researches HIV, for example."
In another case, such accounting schemes have led to a tripling of the Army's Science and Technology budget every year, which has allowed the administration to "truthfully claim that more is being spent on research and development," the official said. "It's just not military R&D."
In one year, the official said, the Pentagon spent $50 million on prostate cancer research "because someone over on the Hill had a buddy who had prostate cancer, got concerned, and threw the money" into the budget.
While the Pentagon budget includes an increasing number of non-military defense expenditures, schools like those that train artillery soldiers have been receiving poor readiness ratings.
Eric Schlect, director of congressional relations for the National Taxpayers Union, is also concerned about shifts in personnel priorities from military to civilian categories.
Though military personnel have been reduced by a third over the last eight years, "civilian personnel levels have not changed much and have increased in some areas, causing the military to have to do more with less," said Schlect.
"You can't expect significantly fewer people to do significantly more with less resources," Schlect said. "It still hasn't dawned on many politicians that the military's doing a lot more in the past five to six years than it did in the 50 years of the Cold War. But they don't want to let facts confuse reality."
Schlect said there were a number of non-defense related items listed in the 2001 Defense Authorization bill:
$3 million for "post-polio syndrome"
$6 million for "coronary/prostate disease reversal"
$5 million for the "Hawaii federal health care network"
$12 million for the "ovarian cancer research program"
$50 million for the "overall peer review medical research program"
$3 million for black colleges and universities
$2.5 million for marijuana eradication in Hawaii
$7.5 million for the national counter-narcotics training center
$20 million for National Guard counter-drug support
Funding for Native American health care
$5 million for public schools "that have unusually high concentrations of special needs military dependents enrolled"
Schlect said "one of my favorites" was the Pentagon's $15 million funding for "arms-control technology."
"I have no idea what that one's for," he said. "On the one hand, the DoD is requesting funds to buy weapons while, on the other hand, it's funding an arms-control measure. It makes no sense."
Schlect said he did not object to some federal funding for education or health-care research, but noted, "I'm not sure what these programs have to do with enhancing the nation's defense or national security. ... You have to ask why they're in the Pentagon's budget."
"The social programs are what are keeping the funding levels the same," the Pentagon official added.
Schlect noted that lawmakers had "earmarked $115 million to remain available 'for transfer to other federal agencies.' Apparently they had money and couldn't find enough programs quickly enough to write the bill, so they just said, 'Well, we're reserve this money for later if we find something else to fund.'"
When Republican presidents were in the White House, before 1993, the official said, the Pentagon would not have spent funds earmarked for such unrelated non-military items.
"We would have complained about it and we would have figured out a way not to spend it or spend it on something useful," said the official.
The Pentagon official also said money had been added to "politically correct" areas favored by the Clinton-Gore administration, such as environmental clean-up efforts.
When asked if the non-military funding in the Defense Department budget was hurting readiness, the official said, "To the extent that we're resource-constrained and that's what's driving our readiness problem, yes it does. It's indirect, but it's there."
Every dollar not spent for "legitimate Defense Department expenditures" eventually affects readiness, the official said, "especially when this additional research ought to be done in the private sector and when you have some military families on welfare."
Earlier in the presidential campaign, Republican nominee George W. Bush began to point out what he said were "serious readiness problems" within the military overall and within the Pentagon's budget structure.
The Gore campaign, along with the White House and the Pentagon's highest-ranking officials, countered that Bush's father, George Bush -- as well as Dick Cheney, then defense secretary and currently George W. Bush's running mate -- first proposed cutting the military's budget.
However, an examination of Defense Department budgets since 1993 show that despite the Bush administration's planned 25 percent drawdown of the Pentagon's budget a year earlier, the Clinton administration doubled the planned cuts to $128 billion. Now, the Defense Department budget is just 2.9 percent of the nation's Gross Domestic Product, compared to 4.2 percent in 1992.
The current level of defense spending is the lowest compared to GDP since before Pearl Harbor.
"What the Clinton administration has also done is squandered a lot of men and material on these frivolous 'world policeman' exercises," the official said, noting that the administration has U.S. military forces in over 100 locations worldwide.
U.S. forces have been deployed on more missions overseas in the 1990s than in the years between the Vietnam war and the end of the Cold War.
According to the Center for Military Readiness, U.S. military forces have been sent on an "unprecedented" 48 overseas missions in the 1990s, compared to just 20 missions in the 15 years between the U.S. exit from Vietnam and the end of the Cold War in 1989.
During that period, active duty forces were cut by nearly 800,000, from 2.2 million to an authorized strength in the 2001 defense budget of just over 1.3 million. The Army has been reduced from 18 to 10 divisions; the Navy from 567 ships to just over 300; and the Air Force's fighter wings have been reduced by nearly half, from 24 to 13.
The Pentagon official and other defense analysts said that overall, the amount of money being misspent on non-military related items "doesn't amount to much when you compare it to the entirety of the overall defense budget."
However, the official said, "when you have some troops on welfare, when you're short of bombs and ammunition, when you can't find enough pilots or spare parts for airplanes -- why is any of the Pentagon's budget spent on non-military related things?"
"If it's of dubious military value or not directly related to military readiness and national defense, no money should be spent by the Pentagon," Schlect added.
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