The budget and its discontents, vol. 2: Are we the Soviets?
February 3rd, 2010 | Blogs Congress leadership Washington | Posted by Phil Ewing
"Keeping my hands steady at the helm, I will pilot the ship of state to smoother, safer waters, comrades!" // davno.ru
The drumbeat continues online for including the Pentagon — with Navy programs inevitably singled out — in the federal government’s proposed spending freeze over the next three years. By continuing to increase the budget for the Defense Department even as the rest of the country feels the squeeze, the U.S. government is as bad as old Soviet Union, the argument goes.
Or so editorialized the Orange County Register, even as it praised Defense Secretary Robert Gates for “cutting” DDG 1000 — Do people not understand the Navy is still building three of them? And that Navy officials made the cuts themselves months before Gates’ infamous announcement last April? — in a piece that accused DoD of continuing the us v. the U.S.S.R. mentality:
What we have is a military still built to meet the challenges of the Cold War some two decades after the Cold War ended. With no prospective enemy that comes close to posing a challenge in air or naval power, in an era when the challenge comes from stateless terrorists who can best be countered by improved intelligence, nimble special forces and relatively inexpensive unmanned drone aircraft, we are spending as if the Soviet Union were still around and threatening us on every front.
The comparison came up again in a comment over at New Wars, which linked to another post with a specific list of weapons or programs the Pentagon should pare back. Specifically, guest blogger Lawrence J. Korb wrote that the Navy should only build two Zumwalts and just one Virginia-class submarine per year, to save money.
What say you? Is the Obama administration running the Pentagon as though we were still in the bad old days?