defense spending

Ben Smith finds some news in Sarah Palin’s all-over-the-place Hong Kong speech.
Despite the need to move men and material by air into theaters like Afghanistan, the Obama Administration sought to end production of our C-17s, the work horse of our ability to project long range power. Despite the Air Force saying it would increase future [...]

There was a lot of encouraging rhetoric for defense reformers from President Obama in his press conference tonight. Asked about the politics of cutting defense, he didn’t back down, and instead cited “uniform acknowledgement” that the procurement process is broken, citing his former presidential rival, Sen,John McCain (R-Ariz.), for political cover. He derided the idea [...]

Has all this bated-breath excitement about Defense Secretary Bob Gates scrubbing the fiscal 2010 Pentagon budget, due next month, been for nothing? Is the defense-spending “spigot” remaining open after all? God will I be embarrassed if so; and according to the Pentagon’s deputy comptroller, it might. From subscription-only Inside The Pentagon:
DOD officials intend to cut [...]

A really good piece from The Washington Post yesterday points out that a ton of wasteful defense spending comes from congressional Democrats.
It was Democrats who stuffed an estimated $524 million in defense earmarks that the Pentagon did not request into the 2008 appropriations bill, about $220 million more than Republicans did, according to an independent [...]

Noting that the Progressive Policy Institute is holding a panel on the defense budget with Rep. John Spratt (D-N.C. S.C.), the chairman of the House Budget Committee, former McCain campaign mouthpiece Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard remarks, “Translation: Only defense has to worry about spending discipline,” under the headline “Progressives for Spending Discipline.”
Counting Spratt [...]

It looks like Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz) is taking a break from embarrassing himself to do something seemingly valuable. At noon, he and Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, are scheduled to hold a press conference announcing new legislation they’re introducing to put limits on weapons-programs acquisition in the [...]

Here’s something to keep an eye on over the next few months: Defense Secretary Bob Gates challenged Congress to help him rein in wasteful defense spending. But some senators are already indicating that they may try and shoehorn defense spending into the stimulus package.

In case it’s somehow flown under your radar (my puns are always intended), shift your glance leftward to Matthew Blake’s thorough and enlightening piece on the $488-billion defense spending bill (beyond the Iraq/Afghanistan tab) passed by Congress without much scrutiny or fanfare.
While the $700-billion bailout made headlines for weeks, this bill, which increased funding for [...]

The $488-billion for defense was just tacked on to a larger spending bill at the last minute, with no separate vetting by appropriations committees. The lack of oversight leads to increased funding for programs repeatedly criticized by Defense Sec. Robert Gates.