Jun.29.2009
2:19 pm
by Chet
Defense Budget Series
On MotherJones.com:
Shock and Audit, by Rachel Morris
I’ve skimmed the series and it seems worth a more detailed read. In the meantime, the opening paragraph contains this checklist, which reads like a manifesto of the Defense Reform Movement (of which Boyd was a founding member):
But although the press touted the proposals as bold and ambitious, they sounded suspiciously like the basic budgeting tips a financial adviser would dispense if you’d lost total control of your personal expenses. The essential principles were:
- Keep track of money that comes in and goes out
- Don’t buy things you don’t need
- Don’t buy things that don’t work
- If you do buy something that doesn’t work, don’t order 200 more of them
Now, we can argue over “need.” I for one don’t feel that we need to keep a significant amount of conventional forces (particularly ships and tanks/ other armor), but there are people with reform credentials better than mine who disagree. Nonetheless, tough to argue with the other three.
Here’s another observation: The cumulative cost overruns, about $300 billion, of weapons now in the defense budget is more than three times the entire defense budget of China, the world’s second biggest spender on defense, and, parenthetically, a country with a nearly 14,000 mile long border, every inch of which represents a potential threat.
Comments are welcome; please observe our comment policy.
Filed in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Defense Budget Series