Before the presidential election, reports began to circulate that the Pentagon was planning to propose a defense spending increase of roughly $450 billion over five years. That’s in addition to the increases in the base budget already laid out in the 2009 Future Years Defense Plan.
The services have been laying the groundwork for the request for several months. Earlier this year, briefing slides showing $60 billion to $80 billion per year in new expenditures started making the rounds inside the Beltway, supported by a public campaign by conservative think tanks and politicians to establish a floor on defense spending at 4 percent of GDP.
As if that’s not bad enough, they are also looking at ways to trap Obama into increasing spending in the military:
The uniformed services are trying to lock in the next administration by creating a political cost for holding the line on defense spending. Conservative groups are hoping to ramp up defense spending as a tool to limit options for a Democratic Congress and president to pass new, and potentially costly, social programs, including health care reform.
They also like the idea of creating an unrealistically high baseline of expectations for defense spending that will allow them to claim President Obama has cut defense spending.
I thought the President was the commander in chief and that this government was by the people, of which the military is part of? It’s time to get our military spending under control. We spend about ten times more than any other military in the world and our economy is in serious trouble. We need to really rethink how we do things instead of throwing away money that can go to much better use.
(h/t TPM)