Posted by
Dawnsblood on Friday, November 24, 2006 5:28:13 PM
It is pretty bad when
a "top tier" media organization gets it so wrong that a soldier in the middle of a war feels the need to spend some of his bunk time refuting them.
It was during President Clinton’s presidency that the
significant drawdown of the defense budget began. From 1992 to 1996, the defense budget was reduced from $339
billion to $277 billion. This slashing
of the defense budget was the primary source of the “Peace Dividend” that the
Clinton Administration touted as its “budget surplus.” In effect, the Clinton Administration was
mortgaging the military’s future to achieve a false “savings.” It is important to understand the nature of
military spending in order to truly understand why this drawdown was so
destructive to the military the United States found itself with prior to the
events of September 11, 2001.
The need for military spending is
determined not just by how many soldiers or tanks or airmen or aircraft the
military purchases. All these wonderful
systems and people require maintenance, training, modernization and
replacement. The current generation of
systems the military is using was originally purchased during the Reagan military
build up of the Cold War. While many of
these systems were designed to be updated, there is a limit to how much
updating that can be done on a system more than 20 years old. At some point it becomes more expensive to
repair and upgrade the weapons system than it does to procure a new, updated
system. Given the glacial speed and
unpredictable nature of the procurement process, it behooves the military to
continually acquire new and improved systems.
Blackfive has the rest.
Go read it all.