[Tom says:] TomDispatch doesn’t usually have what is essentially breaking news. Today, however, it does. Mattea Kramer of the invaluable National Priorities Project has carefully gone over the Pentagon budget numbers and shows to devastating effect just how its sequestration “cuts” -- and all the gloom and doom about the future strength of the U.S. military that went with them -- have really been a con job. With the help of Congress and a separate “war budget” that has no cap and isn’t affected by sequestration cuts, the Pentagon has managed to lose just about no funds at all. It’s quite an incredible story -- as she writes, its one of the great bait-and-switch tales of our moment. Please do give it your attention. [The close of his intro:] Why didnt the Americans just follow through on their zero-option threats and pull the plug on Karzai and the war? Obviously, fear that the Taliban might gain ground in a major way after such a departure was one reason. In January, David Sanger and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times provided another. ... It might, it turned out, be difficult to find other regimes in the region willing to lend bases in support of the U.S. drone campaigns in the Pakistani tribal areas and possibly Afghanistan as well. Today, TomDispatch regular Mattea Kramer provides a third potential reason in her striking explanation of just how the Pentagon has been managing to avoid serious sequestration cuts. It turns out that billions of dollars in extra funding are being salted away in a supplementary war-fighting budget that Congress grants the U.S. military, which is subject to neither cuts nor caps. But here’s a potential problem: that budget relies on the existence of an Afghan War. What if, after 2014, there isn’t even a residual American component to that war? Not that the Pentagon wouldnt try to keep war budget funding alive, but its clearly a harder, more embarrassing task without a war to fund. [Read about it only here, so far.]
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 15:30:28 +0000
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