Stealth Jets to Fight Box-cutters!...

What they don’t really tell you about those big budgets…

It’s hard to get anyone to say it like it is today. Editors don’t want to offend anyone especially their bosses. People don’t want to get involved in the nitty-gritty. The word is keep it lite. So we keep it lite, and the population stays dumb and happy.

Of course, that makes us easy victims for everything that filters down from the top.

Right now, most people who read the papers would be under the impression that raising the Defense budget is a good thing. It is in truth a good thing for the military industrial defense sector which is making out like a bandit, but is it good for you and me? That is the real question. And what does that bloated budget buy us?

Okay, to understand how the game is played, we need to take a step backwards.
Let’s look at how it works: It seems that whenever the president needs an excuse for anything, it is the war against terrorism.

In the war against terrorism, The president has approved an increase in the Defense Department budget to 439.3 billion dollars. Now, I don’t know how you do the math, but that’s a pretty decent budget when the most sophisticated terrorist weapons we faced on 9/11 were 50 cent box-cutters…but that’s how it goes in the US of A.

Inasmuch as the amount of money being spent on the War on Terrorism is starting to sound like some serious money, it is time we started considering our investment like any other investment.

What we do know is that we are spending more money on defense than all of the defense budgets of all our real and imagined enemies put together!; yet despite those staggering numbers, it's still hard to see a tangible benefit.

Consider all of the monies we’ve spent on Homeland Security? What have we gotten for it? Are the borders any safer? Do our first responders have the equipment they need? Are we any better equipped to deal with the spread of anthrax? A suitcase type bomb? Are we any more efficient?

The answer is “no!”

. Why? .

Part of it has to do with pork barrel considerations when the anti-terrorist threat dollars are parceled out not according to threat but the power of political connections.. This has resulted in air conditioned vans for garbage collection in Newark to bullet proof vests for police dogs but it has resulted in few gains for our national anti-terrorism effort..

What’s truly chilling and least appreciated that all of these monies have to come from somewhere. And we learn that they are the result of slicing and dicing programs to help Americans cope, compete or merely survive. They are coming at the expense of education, Medicare and other support programs.

So while we are larding the pork all around except where the dollars are needed most, we are at the same time hollowing out the fundamental programs needed to rebuild America’s economy and infrastructure…We are cutting the heart out of programs designed to keep us competitive in the world. We are cutting the legs off the necessary support systems for our elderly and infirm. And we are taking it away from the children who represent our future…

Why do we need a 430 billion dollar Defense budget anyway? To answer that question, you have to ask a lot of other hard questions: For example, why do we need to replace the F18 program with the new F23 except perhaps to feed the needs of a handful of defense contractors who are always looking for more and more money. The fact is that the F18 has no competition among all of the nations that pose a challenge to our air force. That's another question that should come from a Federal study and investigation into bloated military spending.

Okay, here's another question: Why do we need to pay 100 million dollars more for a fighter than was originally quoted in the mid-nineties? To learn the answer to that, we have to understand the short sighted view of the government. Our government deemed it was okay for essential military subcontractors in the 90's to merge and acquire each other in the quest for larger and larger profits. We didn’t think in terms of whether those decisions were good for the country. We didn’t talk about limiting competition? Now, we are being made to pay the price..

The result: fewer and fewer sources of supply. In some cases we have only one supplier in a category, something that is injurious to the long term health of this country’s defenses.. Yet, that's where we stand and the remaining contractors can reward their own inefficiencies by passing the added costs along to the American people and there is nobody to take issue with the decision. An outrage that needs to be addressed immediately..

Now, to the government paying another 100 million dollars a plane may be okay—after all, it doesn’t come out of their pockets-- but it is ultimately unfair to the American people who must pay that added burden which comes from programs needed for America's survival.

So, on the one hand, while it appears that we have a stronger defense program, the truth is that America is being weakened in fundamental ways by government's neglect of the programs needed to help people cope, survive and compete.. This can go on for years without showing the damage done; but at some point, there will have to be a day of reckoning. And I'm afraid that day is coming! I only hope that it is not too late.

We wouldn’t be the only country in the history of the world to disappear hosting the world’s greatest military power?

Les Aaron