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War, War, War See other War, War, War Articles Title: Pentagon Wants $450 Billion Increase Over Next Five Years By Josh Rogin 11/10/08 "CQ" Pentagon officials have prepared a new estimate for defense spending that is $450 billion more over the next five years than previously announced figures. The new estimate, which the Pentagon plans to release shortly before President Bush leaves office, would serve as a marker for the new president and is meant to place pressure on him to either drastically increase the size of the defense budget or defend any reluctance to do so, according to several former senior budget officials who are close to the discussions. Experts note that releasing such documents in the twilight of an administration is a well-worn tactic, and that incoming presidents often disregard such guidance in order to pursue their own priorities. And with the nation’s economy caught up in a global financial meltdown, it remains unclear whether either Sen. John McCain , R-Ariz., Sen. Barack Obama , D-Ill., or a Democratic Congress would support such large increases for defense next year. “This is a political document,” said one former senior budget official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It sets up the new administration immediately to have to make a decision of how to deal with the perception that they are either cutting defense or adding to it.” Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon’s top budget official from 2001 to 2004, who is not involved in the current discussions, agreed. “The thinking behind it is pretty straightforward,” Zakheim said. “They are setting a baseline for a new administration that then will have to defend cutting it.” The fiscal 2010 portion of the estimate includes a $57 billion increase, out of which $30 billion would go for a vaguely defined contingency fund and $14 billion would go for replacing or fixing existing equipment, called reset, and modernization, the former officials said. They added that those items reflect the Pentagon’s attempt to anticipate the end of huge supplemental war allotments that have hidden the costs of resetting and modernizing the nation’s war-torn force. Both presidential candidates have pledged to scale back supplemental war spending. The Pentagon comptroller’s office refused repeated requests for comment on the figures outlined by the former officials stating that it was premature to discuss future budgets because they were still being worked on. Earlier Budgets Insufficient The new budget numbers reflect the Defense Department’s acknowledgement that the coming bow wave of ever-rising procurement costs, combined with the nonstop growth of defense entitlement spending, will render its already record- high budgets grossly insufficient in the years ahead. But the numbers also seem to condradict the National Defense Strategy released recently by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates , which called for tough tradeoffs in spending in an environment of limited resources. “We cannot do everything, or function equally well across the spectrum of conflict. Ultimately we must make choices,” Gates wrote. The new estimate, which has not been publicly released, would raise the fiscal 2010 budget number announced by the administration this year from $527 billion to $584 billion, not counting operations costs for the ongoing wars. Money to prosecute the ongoing wars is not included in the new estimate, meaning the military would still need significant supplemental appropriations in addition to the increased budget request. Supplemental appropriations have been used to fund procurement and personnel costs that are predictable and therefore should be placed into the regular budget, said Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We’re going to have to figure out how to get off supplementals,” Mullen told a group of Washington reporters Thursday. “My strategic approach is to start to implant those things that are in supplementals that we think we’ve got to have into the baseline budget. We need to start doing that. We’re working our way through the next budget now.” While reset and modernization funds in the new estimate are relatively non-controversial, the $30 billion contingency fund could face stiff opposition on Capitol Hill. That money, if approved, would be available to rapidly deploy active duty forces overseas in the event of an unexpected crisis. In 2001 and 2002, lawmakers rejected attempts by Pentagon leaders to secure a contingency fund, from which they could draw money without requesting additional permission from Congress. “The Congress always saw this from their perspective as a slush fund,” said Zakheim, “Whereas the defense department has said it needed this kind of money because it could never project what exactly would be needed in the event of an emergency.” Presidential Candidates Differ The candidates differ on whether or not large increases in overall defense budgets are wise or even doable. McCain has promised to freeze all discretionary spending except for national security, and is pushing for an additional 150,000 troops above current plans, to be paid for within the base budget. Obama only supports the current planned increase of 92,000 Army and Marine Corps personnel. Both candidates have called for a wholesale reform of the Pentagon’s acquisitions system in an effort to control procurement costs, which have ballooned in recent years due to mismanagement. “The practical fact is that these programs can’t all go into production without a very significant increase in the resources for defense, and I don’t think in light of the current fiscal situation that’s going to be possible,” said former Air Force Secretary Whit Peters, who advises Obama. Supplemental spending bills, which have funded most of the $859 billion appropriated for the Iraq and Afghanistan and global operations to counter terrorism since 2001, are set to be scaled back no matter which candidate wins in November. “I see the future of supplementals as dramatically reduced to genuinely unanticipated needs, like fluctuations in the price of fuel, not programmatic costs or known spending needs,” said McCain in written responses to questions submitted by CQ. “It’s a bad way to do business, and I will bring it to an end.” Peters agreed that large supplemental spending packages would end. “The supplementals have confused things tremendously,” he said, adding that Obama realizes some of the items in the supplementals will have to be folded back into the base budget. Reasons For Extra Funds Unclear Exactly how the Pentagon’s new spending estimate will be communicated to Congress or the incoming administration remains unclear. In April, the White House Office of Management and Budget sent out guidance to all federal agencies that there would be no full budget drill this fall and no formal fiscal 2010 budget submission. All agencies were directed to project future budgets based on current costs, which OMB will then compile into a budget database. But since OMB won’t go through a formal scrubbing process for the submissions as it has done in previous years, it will be up to the next president to decide what to do with the numbers. “The 2010 budget will be submitted by the next president, not the current president,” said OMB spokeswoman Corinne Hirsch. “This administration will certainly be sharing its priorities with the incoming administration in a variety of ways, but that will be outside the formal budget process.” Hirsch said OMB had not received the defense department’s numbers yet, although an OMB memo had said they were due in September. “What is clear is that these additional funds that the Pentagon wants to include in their budget and their five year plan are way beyond the fiscal guidance that OMB gave the department of defense earlier this year,” one former official explained. Moreover, the new numbers are not aligned with any long-term strategic or budgetary rationale that might allow OMB or Congress to judge their wisdom or their impact on the nation’s worsening economic situation, the official said. “The idea that the Pentagon Comptroller’s office wanted these additional funds has been fairly well known,” the former official said. “But there is little out there to give anybody the understanding of why.” Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: richard9151 (#0)
Think of this as part two of Recherche du trillions perdu, my Online Journal article on Dov Zakheim, former Bush appointee as Pentagon Comptroller from May 4, 2001 to March 10, 2004. At that time he was unable to explain the disappearance of $1 trillion dollars. Actually, nearly three years earlier, Donald Rumsfeld announced on September 10, 2001 that an audit discovered $2.3 trillion was also missing from the Pentagon books. That story, as I mentioned, was buried under 9-1133;s rubble. The two sums disappeared on Zakheim33;s watch. Yet on May 6, 2004, Zakheim took a lucrative position at Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the most prestigious strategy consulting firms in the world. One of its clients then was Blessed Relief, a charity said to be a front for Osama bin Laden. Booz, Allen & Hamilton then also worked closely with DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is the research arm of the Department of Defense. So the dark card was shifted to another part of the deck. Judicial Inc33;s bio of Dov (linked below) tells us Zakheim was/is a dual Israeli/American citizen and an ordained rabbi and had been tracking the halls of US government for 25 years, casting defense policy and influence on Presidents Reagan, Clinton, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. He is, as I described him earlier, the bionic Zionist. In fact, Judicial Inc points out that most of Israel33;s armaments were gotten thanks to him. Squads of US F-16 and F-15 were classified military surplus and sold to Israel at a fraction of their value. Judicial Inc also points out that Israel, a country of 4.8 million Russian and Polish Jewish émigrés, flies on one of the biggest Air Forces in the world, thanks to Dov. Conflict of interest here? Depends on what you33;re interested in. That is, in 2001 Dov was CEO of SPS International, part of System Planning Corporation, a defense contractor majoring in electronic warfare technologies, including remote-controlled aircraft systems, and the notorious Flight Termination System (FTS) technology that could hijack even a hijacked plane and land or crash it wherever. More from the resume: Wikipedia points out that Zakheim is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and in 2000 a co-author of the Project for the New American Century33;s position paper, Rebuilding America33;s Defenses, advocating the necessity for a Pearl-Harbor-like incident to mobilize the country into war with its enemies, mostly Middle Eastern Muslim nations. As to Dov33;s hell-raiser lineage, Judicial Inc points out that Grandpa Zakheim was born in 1870, Julius Zakheim (Zhabinka), in the Ukraine, a Russian rabbi who married a relative of Karl Marx. He was a Menshevik/Bolshevik and played a leading role in the 1905 turmoil that paved the way for the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The Bolshevik master plan called for the state of Israel, which was chosen for its proximity to the world's oil and an area of religious significance. Dov33;s Father, Rabbi Jacob I. Zakheim was born in 1910 and reared in Poland33;s swarm of Zionist hard guys, read assassins and bombers. His Polish town, near Bilaystok, also brought us Yitzhak Shir, and family friends included Menachem Begin and Moshe Arens. Dov33;s father was an active member of Betar, formed in 1923 in Riga, Latvia. Its goal was to control the Middle East (and its oil). It was known that the Jewish people needed their own country and they chose Palestine and claimed it a Jewish state 33;on both sides of the Jordan.33; http://www.onlinejournal.com/art...ublish/article_1047.shtml The Department of Defense, already infamous for spending $640 for a toilet seat, once again finds itself under intense scrutiny, only this time because it couldn't account for more than a trillion dollars in financial transactions, not to mention dozens of tanks, missiles and planes. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/ar...a/2003/05/18/MN251738.DTL
Obama only supports the current planned increase of 92,000 Army and Marine Corps personnel. Lets see now, why do we need 100,000 more grunts for NATIONAL DEFENSE???
About a year ago I read a book by former member of the German General staff during WWII. In the 1930's during a ski trip he listened to two older men argue over Hitler and the economy. One said that the military rebuilding of nation was helping put people back to work. The other yelled back just what did he think Hitler was going to do with all those shiny new tanks and bombers. Why, defend the nation of course! That story keeps coming into my mind whenever the Obama supporters try to pass him off as "peace loving." I notice that both the MIC and the Homeland Gestapo have not lost a single nights sleep over the election. They know that no matter who wins the Warfare-Security state marches on.
"The more I see of life, the less I fear death." - Me. "If violence solved nothing, then weapons technology would have never advanced past crude clubs and rocks." - Me.
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