Retired military officials say they’re concerned about potential automatic budget cuts to the Defense Department which may equal up to $500 billion over the next 10 years, in addition to the nearly $500 billion the Pentagon has already cut from its budget over the time.
“There’s no way that it won’t take place,” retired Gen. Ronald R. Fogleman, former Air Force chief of staff, said during a panel discussion hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Fogleman, along with former Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, worried about the so-called sequestration cuts – automatic cuts set to take effect October 1 unless Congress changes the law requiring $1.2 trillion in federal budget cuts over the next decade.
Resistance to cutting the defense budget is perverse after a decade of excessive increases in military expansion. The national security budget for FY 2012 totals around $1.2 trillion, or approximately one-third of the entire budget. That’s more than the rest of the world combined.
The debate about defense cuts is very misleading, though. What is really at stake is reductions in the rate of growth of defense spending. True cuts are not even being considered.
The minuscule defense cuts being contemplated could easily target areas of waste. As a recent report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments found, while the source of growth in annual defense budgets since 2001 has been mostly (54%) due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, much of the rest has been spent on wasteful superfluous weapons technology, bloated salaries and benefits plans, and expensive peacetime operating costs for the 900-plus military bases in 130-plus countries around the world. But Washington is committed to an ever-expanding empire.
"The US spends more than the rest of the world combined on defense and national security”
Above is the fact, a fact which one needs to go back in US history and what its done to nations around the world from Korean war to Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya and now Syria to see why, what its allied stand for, who they are and what is their social political agendas.
US is working with tyrants and dictatorial regimes all over the world, therefore, US major interests is keeping these regimes in place with a military base in respective country, US major interests is to keep Israel, an apartheid regime in place, US needs to work with EU – England militarism regime as Turkey and others. This is a mess, to keep these kind of mess going and to keep the US militarism regime in tact, the US government needs to have such a military and other security in place, US has past the argument in being the empire or imperialism, it has become the militarism regime wanting to militarize the world.
There will be another major so-called "Terror Event" before there will ever be any real cut in defense spending.
It was the total abysmal failure of the American military (along w/ intellgence, law enforcement, counter-terrorism, and highjacked aircraft reaction and response protocol) that enabled 9.11 to be the boooming success that it was.
When those who benefitted most from the first 9.11 determine that they stand to gain even more from another Horror Show, Who and or What is going to stop them?
Why is it that whenever the talk turns to Defense cutting, they (the Pentagon and the media they own) never, ever broach the subject of how much would be cut or saved, if you will, if the wars of aggression the US is now waging were ended? How can not needing multiple billions per month not be a major windfall for the country?
But of course they have no plans to end the wars of aggression…
The USA spends more then the rest of the world combined on "defense". And yet what good did that do on September 11 2001? Where were the planes that could and should have shot down those jets? And how come nobody was forced to resign for the breakdown that led to this failure. If this had been say, the U.K., the minister of defense, would have resigned from the cabinet the next day.
"Retired military officials say they’re concerned about potential automatic budget cuts to the Defense Department"
Translated into English used by normal people: "Yikes! Our lucrative contracts – which we were able to arrange as a result of having been in the military, and knowing the people who approve contracts, and being intimately familiar with how things work – are being threatened!"
If the military wants money for fancy new weapon systems, they should get the government to stop spending money on making wars.