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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GST who wrote (110812)	8/10/2003 12:45:29 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Defense and The National Interest d-n-i.net <<...Did you know that we are spending as much on defense as we did during the height of the Cold War? Yet many of our military leaders tell us they don't have enough money and that we need to buy more modern and expensive weapons to assure our national security. Are they right? It is true that many of our current weapons were designed in the 1970s (or earlier—most of the C-130 transports flown by the active-duty Air Force fought in Vietnam). And our fighting men and women deserve the tools they need to do their jobs with minimum loss of life. On the other hand, our new fighters and ships were designed to defeat weapons that might have been fielded by the Soviet Union, and may do no better than their predecessors in the emerging "fourth generation warfare" that has caused us such problems in places like Vietnam, Somalia, and the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center...>> Bill Moyers Interviews Franklin Spinney...Here's some background on his guest... <<...The Military Industrial Congressional Complex - Out of touch and "Versailles" on the Potomac Chuck Spinney is an American patriot who has written and spoken about how Pentagon spending does nothing to decrease military threats or enhance our fighting forces capabilities to defeat the terrorist organizations that now confront us. The Soviet threat is done; it's over. Yet our dollars are spent at the Pentagon to keep weapons programs alive that should have been suspended or buried years ago: the Comanche, the B-2, the F-22, the V-22, the Star-Wars defense system - the physics don't work. If corporations ran their development and budgeting programs like the Pentagon bankruptcy would soon follow. Over $1 TRILLION cannot be accounted for!..>> pbs.org Here's a link to the transcript of the recent interview on August 1, 2003... 08.01.03 Transcript: Bill Moyers interviews Chuck Spinney pbs.org an excerpt... <<...MOYERS: So we keep spending big money on those old systems even… SPINNEY: For the wrong threat. MOYERS: But America has just won a war against Iraq. I mean, some people would say, look, somebody must be doing something right. SPINNEY: Well, the first thing I would say is Iraq has been under sanctions for ten years or so. They have a defense budget of 1.8 billion. Most of their equipment is vintage Soviet equipment. They're untrained. We spend $460 billion when you count the supplemental for fighting the war to take out Iraq in a month. If you can't do that for $460 billion what can you do? MOYERS: Is this $400 billion Congressionally approved budget a scandal in your mind? SPINNEY: Yes. It isn't gonna fix our problems. It's certainly unnecessary. And you can't look at this budget in isolation. This budget is being put into place, and it's gonna generate an enormous tail in the out years because we're politically engineering all these programs and building up all this support in the Congressional districts. It's gonna be very difficult to turn this spending off. MOYERS: This strikes me as somewhat mad. SPINNEY: It is. We're in Versailles on the Potomac. It's we basically exist for ourselves. And we live in a hall of mirrors. It's a good metaphor. MOYERS: Like Versailles. SPINNEY: Like Versailles. And you have to remember, our decisions basically are to spend other people's money, and ultimately to spill other people's blood. We don't pay the price for these decisions. There's an asymmetric burden of risk. The risk that the promoters of something like Star Wars or an F-22 or you name it, whatever kind of weapon bears is a risk that the program might be canceled. But if you look at the other risk, the other risk, the taxpayer bears the economic risk. Not the program manager. And the soldier who may have to use this piece of equipment in a serious war. You know, his life is on the line. Well, those risks don't really have much of an impact on decision-makers who are more interested in the preservation of their program. MOYERS: Chuck Spinney, thank you very much. SPINNEY: Thank you...>>