Short, concise and to the point

William Arkin writes in Our Money Problem and Walter Reed Early Warning blog 03/08/07:

The total defense budget for fiscal 2008 then - regular budgets plus emergency supplemental requests plus bridge funds - will be about $620 billion, close to Vietnam War levels of spending.

Antiwar opponents decry the billion dollars a day we seem to be throwing away over there.

Others argue that defense spending as a proportion of the GNP or in relationship to our healthy economy is far below Cold War levels and is scandalously low.

But the far more interesting question is, why aren't we getting improved security and successful military operations for our money?

Testifying before Congress last month, Dr. Gordon Adams, a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Clinton era national security spending czar at OMB precisely asked this, saying "if we cannot provide military security for the United States at this level of spending there is something seriously wrong with planning and implementation in the Department of Defense."

Yep. Well said.

Tags: military budget