The Obama administration will ask Congress for another $83.4 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through the end of September, Democratic congressional sources said Thursday.
The request is expected to pay for those conflicts for the rest of the 2009 budget year, two Democratic congressional sources said.
The money would bring the running tab for both conflicts to about $947 billion, according to figures from the Congressional Research Service.
More than three-quarters of the $864 billion appropriated so far has gone to the war in Iraq, where most of the U.S. troops involved in those conflicts have been deployed, the agency estimated.
Since taking office in January, President Obama has announced plans to shift troops out of Iraq and beef up U.S. forces in Afghanistan, where American troops have been battling al Qaeda and Taliban fighters since al Qaeda’s 2001 attacks.
The additional money is needed “to fund the new strategy in Afghanistan and fund the process in Iraq that will lead to a drawdown of all of our combat troops,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.
About $75 billion of the requested funds would pay for military operations, with the rest going to diplomatic programs and development aid.
The measure is likely to be the last supplemental request submitted to Congress to pay for the wars.
Likely the last supplemental request? Is it the last just like the DEA raids in California were to stop?
AP/USAF We could use some more F-22s
The Department of Defense is preparing budget cuts in response to the decline in national income. The DOD budgeteers and their counterparts in the White House Office of Management and Budget apparently reason that a smaller GDP requires belt-tightening by everyone.
That logic is exactly backwards. As President-elect Barack Obama and his economic advisers recognize, countering a deep economic recession requires an increase in government spending to offset the sharp decline in consumer outlays and business investment that is now under way. Without that rise in government spending, the economic downturn would be deeper and longer. Although tax cuts for individuals and businesses can help, government spending will have to do the heavy lifting. That’s why the Obama team will propose a package of about $300 billion a year in additional federal government outlays and grants to states and local governments.A temporary rise in DOD spending on supplies, equipment and manpower should be a significant part of that increase in overall government outlays. The same applies to the Department of Homeland Security, to the FBI, and to other parts of the national intelligence community.
The increase in government spending needs to be a short-term surge with greater outlays in 2009 and 2010 but then tailing off sharply in 2011 when the economy should be almost back to its prerecession level of activity. Buying military supplies and equipment, including a variety of off-the-shelf dual use items, can easily fit this surge pattern.
For the military, the increased spending will require an expanded supplemental budget for 2009 and an increased budget for 2010. A 10% increase in defense outlays for procurement and for research would contribute about $20 billion a year to the overall stimulus budget. A 5% rise in spending on operations and maintenance would add an additional $10 billion. That spending could create about 300,000 additional jobs. And raising the military’s annual recruitment goal by 15% would provide jobs for an additional 30,000 young men and women in the first year.
So building death machines and expanding the military industry complex will make things better? Ignoring the MIC component completely it’d seem to me that opportunity cost alone would show this to be false. By definition the free market is the most efficient use of resources at any particular time. The further you get away from someone’s top priority the worse you make things. Throwing money at multimillion dollar flying death machines is pretty low on most people’s list. People want defense from possible harm but F-22s and the American MIC don’t provide that. They make us less safe. These Keynesians are destroying us from within and pissing off others without.
Find out why here. At least the pilots survived.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/…
Government auditors issued a scathing review yesterday of dozens of the Pentagon’s biggest weapons systems, saying ships, aircraft and satellites are billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.The Government Accountability Office found that 95 major systems have exceeded their original budgets by a total of $295 billion, bringing their total cost to $1.6 trillion, and are delivered almost two years late on average. In addition, none of the systems that the GAO looked at had met all of the standards for best management practices during their development stages.
Auditors said the Defense Department showed few signs of improvement since the GAO began issuing its annual assessments of selected weapons systems six years ago. “It’s not getting any better by any means,” said Michael Sullivan, director of the GAO’s acquisition and sourcing team. “It’s taking longer and costing more.”
Chris Isleib, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a written statement, “We’d like to look at what GAO has said, and then at the appropriate time make an informed comment.”
What do you expect from a system without real competition or limit on spending? Besides not needing the weapons to kill more brown people at all, I’m sure that $295m could have been better spent by the taxpayers who are currently having a hard time paying for inflated subsidized food and war induced high gasoline prices.
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