Wednesday, May 6, 2020

Is Now The Time To Cut The U.S. Defense Budget?

Wikipedia

Fred Kaplan, Slate: Now Is the Time to Cut the Defense Budget

Let’s figure out how to do it responsibly.

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper is worried that the COVID-19 crisis might waylay his plans to increase the military budget. No kidding. But the way Esper formulated the problem shows he isn’t remotely prepared to deal with it.

Esper said on Monday that “we need 3 to 5 percent annual real growth” in the defense budget. Since this year’s budget amounts to $740 billion, he’s talking about increasing it by $22 billion to $37 billion—for a total, next year, of up to $777 billion, or actually a bit more than that, since he called for that much “real growth,” meaning growth beyond the level of inflation.

Yet, Esper added, he is “concerned” that the government’s $3 trillion infusion into the economy, to keep the country and its people alive during the lockdown, “may throw us off that course.”

Read more ....

WNU Editor: What U.S. policy makers and their political masters should first do is have a debate on what are the U.S. national security priorities, what resources will be necessary to fulfill them, and then allocate the funds and programs. It does not make sense to me to cut the budget, and then mandate the Pentagon to try and fulfill what are the priorities of the U.S. government with the resources that they have (or may not have).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

So much for experts. Fauci is an "expert'. Deviate from his advice and you will be removed.

Experts at the Pentagon put together the QDR. That should be the starting point perhaps of discussion on priorities.

"What U.S. policy makers and their political masters should first do is have a debate on what are the U.S. national security priorities"

Another thing is Slate. The article is in Slate and penned by a liberal Jewish person. Which is to say Kaplan is liberal and not Jewish. The first half of the 19th century must have been some type of Hell. Not the same hell as Slavery or Jim Crow, but still hell. So many liberal 'Jews" are complete bastards. Some sort of payback.

Not once does Kaplan mention the QDR. All he does is come at the cost angle again. It is an important angle. When was the last time a liberal looked at the cost angle of bigger programs exploding the budget? They do not.

This is just another journeyman effort. Just another attack run at the defense budget.

Anonymous said...

"From 1978 to 1980, he was a foreign and defense policy adviser to U.S. Congressman Les Aspin (D, Wisconsin)." - Wiki

Look who Fred Kaplan hung with. Les Aspin who denied our boys tanks in Somalia. It would look too war like. So when crunch time came, the Mighty US had to rely on Pakistan and that took hours and hours just like Benghazi.

These dirty birds never change.