Pork, Corruption, and the Military Budget - BushCo Style

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1802&ncid=1802&e=1&u=/washpost/20041120/ts_washpost/a63815_2004nov19

"By R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post Staff Writer
Air Force Secretary James G. Roche asked a lobbyist for Boeing Co. to use the company's Washington contacts to "quash" a deputy undersecretary of defense and make him "pay an appropriate price" for objecting to the Air Force's decision to lease Boeing 767 tanker aircraft, according to e-mails released yesterday by a Republican senator critical of the tanker deal

Roche also pressured independent military cost analysts who questioned the high price of the lease, described other internal Pentagon (news - web sites) critics as "animals," and ridiculed executives at European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co. (EADS) and its Airbus division, the consortium that offered a competing plan, the e-mails show. He told his top public relations aide to "blow . . . away" the EADS chairman for raising questions about the Air Force decision to work with Boeing.

At one point in the three-year Air Force campaign for the lease, Roche e-mailed a friend at Raytheon Co., "Privately between us: Go Boeing!"

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld issued a statement hailing Roche for serving "our country capably and with honor.""

 

Totally agree. The whole system needs an overhaul. Thanks for the link.

Not that this is why I only posted the military link (it's just the only one I saw at that time early on a Sunday am), but I do think the military budget is more pork laden than other areas, from my past experience. It's just a lot easier to get stuff passed when it has the veneer of "defense" even if noone really believes it to be legit.

I'd say a good 1/4 of the "defense" (idiotic Orwellian name) budget is nothing but pork, and another 1/4 pretty close to it in the form of keeping open redundant overseas bases and/or purchasing duplicate and triplicate weapons systems (usage-wise).

 

Well, by "redundant bases," I was referring to our silly imperial presence in over a hundred nations--way overkill, IMO, and I think much of the rationale to keep them (and even expand, recently) is due to the various contracts that interested parties want to get to support them. So that's not exactly "pork," but it is in my estimation. I'd put SDI in the pork category too.

Anyway, regardless of whether the military budget is bloated by 1/2 or 1/3 or whatever number you want to argue, what do you mean by a "European style military?" As opposed to a Asian one? A South American one? I'd just like us to have a SANE military not beholden to a corporate-government complex that uses it as economic muscle to secure greater and greater profits for a very few corrupt peope.

 

No, embassy security not included.

I'll see if I can find it. I know I came across the number recently, and was surprised at how high it really was--I think it referred to a dozen or so new ones in the Middle East alone. It might have been from Chalmers Johnson's new book, "The Sorrows of Empire," now that I think of it.

Here are some passages from an excerpt available online:
http://www.presentdanger.org/papers/sorrows2003.html

Re: military pork generally:

"The permanent military domination of the world is an expensive business. During fiscal year 2003, the U.S.'s military appropriations bill, signed on October 23, 2002, came to $354.8 billion. For fiscal year 2004, the Department of Defense asked Congress for a 4.2% increase, to $380 billion. When the budget was presented, sycophantic Congressmen spent most of their time asking the defense secretary if he was sure he did not need even more money and suggesting big weapons projects that could be built in their districts. They seemed to say that no matter how much the U.S. spends on "defense," it will not be enough. The next largest military spender is Russia, but its military budget is only 14% of the U.S.'s total. To equal current U.S. expenditures, the military budgets of the next twenty-seven highest spenders would have to be added together. The American amounts do not include the intelligence budgets, most of which are controlled by the Pentagon, nor do they include expenditures for the Iraq war or the Pentagon's request for a special $10 billion account to combat terrorism."

And here's part of what I remember from the book regarding foreign bases, though I think he was more specific in it:

"The Pentagon has deployed a quarter of a million troops against Iraq, several thousand soldiers are engaged in daily skirmishes in Afghanistan, countless Navy and Air Force crews are manning strategic weapons in the waters off North Korea, a few thousand Marines have been dispatched to the southern Philippines to fight a century-old Islamic separatist movement, several hundred "advisers" are participating in the early stages of a Vietnam-like insurgency in Colombia and elsewhere in the Andean nations, and the U.S. currently maintains a military presence in 140 of the 189 member countries of the United Nations, including significant deployments in twenty-five. The U.S. has military treaties or binding security arrangements with at least thirty-six countries."

I'm assuming that he's not talking about embassy marines when he says military presence--otherwise, it would be 189 of 189, no?

Actually, checking on the source that he cites for that statistic, you get this from a Canadian researcher:

"...the United States maintains more than 800 foreign military installations including 60 major ones. Many current U.S. bases were acquired after previous wars--from the Second World War through the war in Afghanistan. Bases obtained in one war are seen as forward deployment positions for some future war, often involving an entirely new enemy. The Bush administration says publicly that it will leave the Central Asian bases after the "war on terrorism" is over, but privately officials admit they are there to stay. As well as bases, the U.S. is sending in military advisers to a host of countries."

http://www.fpif.org/outside/commentary/2002/0212milbase.html