Wall Street Pain Coming to Military

[unhappycamper]

Wall Street Pain Coming to Military
November 06, 2008
New York Times

WASHINGTON — After years of unfettered growth in military budgets, Defense Department planners, top commanders and weapons manufacturers now say they are almost certain that the financial meltdown will have a serious impact on future Pentagon spending.

Across the military services, deep apprehension has led to closed-door meetings and detailed calculations in anticipation of potential cuts. Civilian and military budget planners concede that they are already analyzing worst-case contingency spending plans that would freeze or slash their overall budgets.

The obvious targets for savings would be expensive new arms programs, which have racked up cost overruns of at least $300 billion for the top 75 weapons systems, according to the Government Accountability Office. Congressional budget experts say likely targets for reductions are the Army’s plans for fielding advanced combat systems, the Air Force’s Joint Strike Fighter, the Navy’s new destroyer and the ground-based missile defense system.

Even before the crisis on Wall Street, senior Pentagon officials were anticipating little appetite for growth in military spending after seven years of war. But the question of how to pay for national security now looms as a significant challenge for the next president, at a time when the Pentagon’s annual base budget for standard operations has reached more than $500 billion, the highest level since World War II when adjusted for inflation.

On top of that figure, supplemental spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has topped $100 billion each year, frustrating Republicans as well as Democrats in Congress. In all, the Defense Department now accounts for half of the government’s total discretionary spending, and Pentagon and military officials fear it could be the choice for major cuts to pay the rest of the government’s bills.


Rest of article at: http://www.military.com/news/article/wall-street-pain-coming-to-military.html

[Burma Jones]

1. Good......and I'm a defense contractor

My company's specialty is making the best out of what you already have........

[unhappycamper]

2. I suspect you're gonna be getting real busy when the house of cards collapse.

The 2009 military budget is almost a trillion dollars. I doubt it will stand as is.

[patrice]

3. This country needs to STOP and have a serious discussion about the Morality of conducting

push-button, remote control, "robot" wars, "from over the horizon", or whatever these new weapons systems are supposed to do.

I'm very afraid of what some of these new weapons systems might be. I worry about "little" nukes.

War is BAD enough but at least when killing others is a matter of putting your own life on the line and very possibly also dying the Moral grounds are more appropriate and the consequences of the behaviors of those involved are equal - not just some poor bastards being fried from a distance and the guy who made it happen experiences no consequence of his behavior whatsoever and just goes on to plan his college career and subsequent life as a bureaucrat in the military-industrial complex.

If you decide that the value of something is worth human life, that value is a LIE unless that human life is your OWN. Even though I may disagree with you about the value of that something, if you place your own life directly on the line, right or wrong, you have met your moral responsibilities.

[patrice]

4. P.S. And when we LIE about the Real Value of something, eventually that catches up with us and . . .

terrible terrible things happen . . .

[TahitiNut]

5. The morality of "stand-off" weaponry has been argued since the bow-and-arrow.

The entire history of warfare has, as a subtext, two (strangely dissonant) "moral" arguments: (1) stand-off weaponry from the bow-and-arrow to ICBMs, and (2) civilian exposure. The counter-argument about "suicide attacks" has been present off and on ... including the Japanese "Divine Wind" (kamikaze).