Bloated, War Weary Pentagon Must Adjust to Budget Cuts

Compared with a decade ago, the military is bigger, more closely connected to the CIA, more practiced at taking on terrorists and more respected by the American public. But its members also are growing weary from war, committing suicide at an alarming rate and training less for conventional warfare. The Pentagon’s leaders will have to adjust to a new era of austerity after a decade in which the defense budget doubled, to nearly $700 billion this year. With a beleaguered military corp – as Robert Gates put it shortly before he stepped down as defense secretary this summer – peace will bring its own problems.

Read Robert Burns’s entire piece for the Associated Press!

Author: John Glaser

John Glaser writes for Antiwar.com.