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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsOink Oink: Pentagon says it needs $200-300 billion more!
Despite some loosening of spending caps in the past year, Pentagon budget planners need to present Congress with some stark choices, an experienced specialist said on Thursday in releasing a new analysis of President Obamas fiscal 2015 defense budget.
Were at a fork in the road, said Todd Harrison, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, noting a significant gap between the Defense Departments likely future budgets and its long-term strategy described in the Pentagons 2012 guidance and reaffirmed in the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review. Neither of those documents took into account the 2011 Budget Control Acts since-modified spending caps, he said.
Its not realistic to think Congress will accept the savings Obama proposed in his request for $560 billion as a base budget in 2015 ($495 billion of which is discretionary), according to Harrison. Either the Pentagon should start submitting budgets that are fully resourced and show us the gap, or it should adjust the strategy to fit the budget, despite the threat environment, he said.
Harrisons study places the gap between the militarys budget and and what it says it needs at $200 billion to $300 billion. The impact of sequestration, he says, has caused a 12 percent drop in defense spending since 2010, which would total $1 trillion over 10 years if the law stays in place. Congress should raise the caps or at lease allow the department some flexibility, he told a reporters breakfast meeting.
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http://www.govexec.com/defense/2014/09/pentagon-congress-face-stark-budget-choices/93200/?oref=river
hobbit709
(41,694 posts)gratuitous
(82,849 posts)Does Mr. Harrison, private citizen, have some ideas where an additional billion dollars a day for the bottomless maw of defense is going to come from? Would he like to go around the country and personally explain to people why their schools can't afford books or their roads are pot-holed destruction derbies? We gotta have . . . something. Care to tell us where the money's coming from, Mr. Harrison, since your financiers absolutely refuse to pay an extra penny in taxes?
GeorgeGist
(25,321 posts)We're going down.
Lurks Often
(5,455 posts)like they want to and stop funding unwanted projects.............