All Guns, No Butter

[marmar]

from In These Times:



News > August 8, 2008
All Guns, No Butter
By George Kenney



Now retired, Thomas P. Christie has served the U.S. government as an influential military analyst and manager. After holding senior positions at the Pentagon on and off from 1973, Christie worked as director of Operational Test and Evaluation from 2001-2005, the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester, the highest ranking civil service appointment in the Pentagon. Though largely unknown outside the Pentagon, Christie was a key figure in some of the biggest battles over military spending in recent years.

He regularly disproved contractors’ claims about new weapons systems, though some of the most unecessary have continued to be developed nonetheless. A master bureaucrat, tall, white-haired, soft-spoken, Christie rose through the ranks, providing leadership and institutional cover for an informal group of like-minded individuals concerned with Pentagon deficiencies across the board, from tactics and strategy to technology and economics.

More vocal than ever in retirement, Christie’s insights remain essential to discussions about how to control breakaway military spending.

The Pentagon spends enormously. The Defense budget for fiscal year ‘09 is $519 billion — $129 billion for personnel, $180 billion for operations and maintenance, $104 billion for procurement, $80 billion for research and development, $24 billion for military construction and $2 billion for management.

But that doesn’t come close to how much money eventually will be spent on the military. That doesn’t include the <$165 billion> supplemental . So you’re easily up to $700 billion in this coming fiscal year. And a large part of the budget is over in the Department of Energy — all the nuclear stuff. The Veteran’s Administration is carrying a burden associated with our veterans. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3808/all_guns_no_butter/

[unhappycamper]

1. I think the the 2009 military budget is $903,700,000,000.

$735,700,000,000 baseline and $168,000,000,000 to continue the occupations.

[Hangingon]

2. Christie is a good man. He is one of Boyd's people.

[GoesTo11]

3. If we spent the same proportion of GDP on military as

the rest of the world on average, we would probably have no deficit and billions and billions to invest in infrastructure and human services. In other words, we could spend like other countries do.

Wonder what the long term effects of our empire doing this this will be?