Pentagon Said to Offer Cuts in the Billions
The Pentagon plans to retire one of the Navy’s 12 aircraft carriers, buy fewer amphibious landing ships for the Marine Corps and delay the development of a costly Army combat system of high-tech arms as part of $60 billion in proposed cuts over the next six years, Congressional and military officials said Wednesday.
The proposed reductions, the details of which are still being fine-tuned and which would require Congressional approval, result from White House orders to all federal agencies to cut their spending requests for the 2006 fiscal year budgets, which will be submitted to lawmakers early next year.
The proposed Pentagon cuts, which include sharply reducing the program for the Air Force’s F/A-22 fighter and delaying the purchase of a new Navy destroyer, would for the first time since the Sept. 11 attacks slow the growth in Pentagon spending, which has risen 41 percent in that period, to about $420 billion this year. Military and Congressional officials said the Pentagon was looking to trim up to $10 billion in the 2006 budget alone.
The budget-cutting is likely to foreshadow additional reductions of weapons designed in the cold war and the revamping of America’s arsenal as the Pentagon prepares for its quadrennial review of military weapons and equipment to address current and long-term security threats, including the insurgency in Iraq and a possibly resurgent China.
With the rising costs of our military operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan being more than $5 billion dollars a month I can understand the need to cut back on programs that are decades old – - but to cut the funds from the budgets of the military branches is not a good idea. Some things may look good on paper, but in reality they aren’t good.
I agree. You know my feelings on federal spending. Start with the pork barrell and work out from there. We need to scrap and re-start new/modern agencies. The ones we have are antiquated dinosours.
If we don’t have the ability to defend ourselves, the rest is academic.
The Administration has left itself little choice, it has not cut programs that could be cut in the election year, and it won’t raise taxes, so something has to give. This huge deficit is going to catch up to either the president in this term or whoever wins the next term.
Sandy, if the administration did what it should have and dismantled decades of Democrat pork, you’d be the first screaming. Be honest for once. You just want to take away through government taxation the excess you think your neighbors have to bring them down to your level economically.
Lets reduce lifetime welfare benefits to 6 months! If you can’t find any work in that amount of time, your suspect for dependency class.
4,
Thanks for psychoanalysing me, but no, that’s not what I’m thinking.
We really do need some zero based budgeting to get rid of mohair subsidies, and we need to shit can the Gaea-based productivity sapping green/red legislation.