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Tue. Sep 26, 2006

Do Budget Bozos Hate Our Troops?

We can afford tax cuts. We can afford all kinds of new spending (“Federal spending in 2006 is set to rise 9%, the largest increase since 1990 [...] the Senate is preparing to bust fiscal year (FY) 2007 discretionary spending caps by at least $32 billion”). Deficit spending? Not a problem. But, we’ve got to cut corners on the budget for our overstretched military.

Say what? Read it and weep. It appears there’s been “a series of cuts in the service’s funding requests by both the White House and Congress over the last four months.” Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army’s chief of staff, has been shouting about the problems since June, to no avail. He’s even pointed out to them “the steps that would have to be taken to meet the lower figure, which included cutting four combat brigades and an entire division headquarters unit.”

In the end, “The Army’s top officer withheld a required 2008 budget plan from Pentagon leaders last month after protesting to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the service could not maintain its current level of activity in Iraq plus its other global commitments without billions in additional funding.”

He deliberately failed to meet the deadline. His inaction basically said, I’m not playing your stupid rigged game. Personally, I’m reminded of the phrase “rode hard and put up wet.”

And it’s not just the obvious manpower issues. It’s equipment: “Based on information from the Pentagon and estimates by analysts such as former Reagan Pentagon official Lawrence Korb, the costs of restoring destroyed and damaged Army and Marine Corps equipment is now estimated to be close to $30 billion, and it will grow by an additional $14 billion for every additional year we stay in Iraq. Even if these funds were available tomorrow, it would take years to restore the forces to the state they were in at the outset of the conflict.”

In fact, it’s going on right here in “Georgia, where the Third Infantry Division is preparing for the likelihood that it will go back to Iraq for a third tour. Col. Tom James, who commands the division’s Second Brigade, acknowledged that his unit’s equipment levels had fallen so low that it now had no tanks or other armored vehicles to use in training and that his soldiers were rated as largely untrained in attack and defense.”

So, while the President is speechifying about how tough we’ve got to be in this war, here in the southeastern part of my state, there are men and women who he will be sending back to Iraq next year, and they literally haven’t even got a tank to spit in.

One might call that shameful, but it would hardly seem to cover the offense. Some time ago, I used the phrase “unconscionable malpractice” in reference to Donald Rumsfeld. While I believe it still applies to him, I now think it applies to a lot of others as well. Most everybody in the budget chain who didn’t at some point in the process say, “what the hell are we doing here?”

You can’t just call somebody and have a brigade’s worth of Abrams tanks delivered next week. Or maybe even in six months. There’s a real reckoning on the horizon. And it will be met by people who act as if they are insane.

They tell us again and again and again, “we’re at war!” And then they underfund that war, while giving us tax cuts, deficit spending, and bridges to nowhere. If that’s not insanity, what is it? Because it certainly isn’t what you would call the winning strategy of a nation seriously at war. It’s pretty much the opposite.