President Trumps signs $738 billion US defense spending bill for 2020

(December 23) US President Donald Trump signed a huge defense bill on Friday that authorizes $738 billion for fiscal year 2020. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) grants a based budget of $658.4 billion plus $71.5 billion for overseas contingency operations.

As well as granting a 3.1 percent pay increase for troops this year offers the first even paid family leave for all federal workers. The new Space Force is also created but with existing members of the military. However this is the first addition to sister services in 72 years. There has been a $21 billion increase to spending compared to last year.

Lockheed Martin's pricey F-35 jets

A recent article notes: "The Pentagon on Tuesday announced a $34 billion F-35 contract with Lockheed Martin, the largest contract yet for the defense company’s costly fighter program.The deal is for the delivery of 478 of the aircraft."

In April the Pentagon has asked for $57.7 billion to invest in the air section of the military. Then the Defense Dept. had asked for $11.2 billion to purchase 78 F-35 jets. The US Congress added on additional oversight measures but at the same time raised funding in the NDAA to $12.2 billion to purchase a total of 90 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters.

The new defense policy bars delivery of F-35 jets to Turkey after Turkey struck a deal with Russia for defensive missiles as reported by CNN earlier this year: "Two years ago, Turkey declared it would buy Russia's S-400 missile defense system because the United States had dragged its feet in selling an American alternative.But the deal, worth about $2 billion and consummated this week, has consequences far beyond the cost to Ankara's defense budget."

Other aircraft programs

The NDAA budget supports full funding of the requested $1 billion for 48 AH-64E attack helicopters. $2 billion will be spent on 24 Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fighters and alsol $1.1 billion for 8 Boeing F-15EX jets. The US Congress has also authorized $3 billion towards the long-range stealth B-21 bomber for the US air force. The next US heavy bomber called the Raider will be manufactured by Northrop Grumman.

Navy programs

The Pentagon had requested $34.7 billion for shipbuilding the biggest request in more than 20 years to enlarge and modernize the US Navy fleet. The NDAA supported the construction of three DDG-51 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, two amphibious ships, a frigate, and three unmanned vessels.

The NDAA maintained that the US had to maintain a minimum of 11 aircraft carriers to protect US interests around the world. The NDAA also supported a plant to purchase 10 Virginia-class attack submarines.

Expenditures for ground combat

There will be $0.6 billion for 131 armored multipurpose vehicles and also $2.2 billion for 165 Abrams tanks. There are also funds to modernize 152 Stryker combat vehicles made by General Dynamics. There is also $249.2 million for Stryker's medium-caliber weapons system.

Spending likely to boost defense stocks

A recent article reports: "Geopolitical uncertainty coupled with a colossal uptick in U.S. military spending could make defense stocks a winning trade once again in 2020. Under the Trump administration, the space has left the broader stock market in the dust. The iShares U.S. Aerospace & Defense exchange-traded fund (ITA) has rallied more than 70% since Nov. 8, 2016. The S&P 500, meanwhile, is up around 50% in that time. This year has been no different. The ITA ETF has surged more than 30% in 2019 while the S&P 500 has gained around 27%."

Previously published in the Digital Journal

US House of Representatives passes as two-year $1.48 trillion military spending billl

(July 26)A $1.48 trillion two-year military spending bill easily passed through the US House of Representatives by a vote of 284 for and only 149 against.

Breakdown of votes

The Democrats were mostly in favor of the bill with 219 voting for it along with 65 Republicans. Only 16 Democrats voted against the bill. 132 Republicans and an independent voted against the bill.

President Trump was quick to applaud passage of the bill, calling it a victory for the military.

The Progressive Caucus threatened in April to tank the bill, claiming that the Pentagon outlays were out of control. However, most of the caucus ended up voting for the bill pointing to the increase in domestic spending the bill will provide.

Other responses to the bill's passage

Representatives Pramila Jayapal and Mark Pocan, co-chairs of the Progressive Caucus, said in a statement before the vote, "It's not a perfect deal by any means.This deal does not address the bloated Pentagon budget, but it does begin to close the gap in funding for families, by allocating more new non-defense spending than defense spending for the first time in many years."

Executive director of Win Without War,Stephen Miles disputed the Progressive Caucus claim that the bill has more non-defense than defense spending: "Under this deal, the Pentagon and its affiliated programs will get $1.48 trillion over the next two years. The entire rest of gov't, including the VA btw, will get $1.30 trillion. That's $178.6 billion more for the Pentagon than the whole rest of gov't. So, for the love of god, can we all stop pretending like this is somehow anything other than a continued orgy of unprecedented, wasteful, and obscene spending at the Pentagon."

William Hartung, of the Centre for International Policy's Arms and Security Project also noted that the budget deal vastly overpays the Pentagon saying: "At $738 billion for Fiscal Year 2020 and $740 billion for Fiscal Year 2021, the agreement sets the table for two of the highest budgets for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy since World War II. The proposed figures are higher than spending at the height of the Vietnam and Korean Wars, and substantially more than the high point of the Reagan buildup of the 1980s. And the Fiscal Year 2020 and Fiscal Year 2021 numbers are only slightly less than spending in 2010, when the United States had 180,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, roughly nine times the number currently deployed."

The bill is expected to pass in the Senate

The 2020 budget bill is expected to pass in the Senate next week. Trump has said that he would sign it. The Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has along with the president celebrated the increase in military spending in the bill. The bill has significantly more funds for the military than the Pentagon requested. McConnell said the bill met the Republicans' number one priority of providing for defense.

Bill raises debt limit

As a recent article notes: "The House on Thursday passed a bill to raise the U.S. debt ceiling and set budget levels for two years, taking a step toward avoiding calamity that threatens to disrupt the economy...It sets discretionary spending at about $1.37 trillion in fiscal 2020 and slightly higher in fiscal 2021. The agreement suspends the U.S. borrowing limit for two years."

Previously published in the Digital Journal

US military spending incurs huge costs as US debt totals $20 trillion

Instead of defense and military spending in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere being accompanied by increased taxes or sale of bonds, taxes are about to be cut.

The U.S. government has been operating at a deficit since 2002 and the debt now totals $20 trillion. Yet the Republican tax plan is estimated to add $1.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

Senator Jack Reed, of the Senate Armed Services Committee said: “We have to recognize that we have been borrowing for 16 years to pay for military operations. It’s the first time really in history with any major conflict that we have borrowed rather than ask people to contribute to the national defense directly, and the result is we’ve got this huge fiscal drag… that we’re not really accounting for or factoring into deliberations about fiscal policy as well as military policy.”

Pentagon cost estimates leave out important costs

The Pentagon's most recent estimate of what was spent on foreign wars since 2001 is also $1.5 trillion.

However many of the costs associated with the wars are not included. The Cost of War Project includes in costs security funding, care for veterans, and interest on the debt being created. Their latest report claims war-related costs from 2001 to 2017 come to over $4.3 trillion.

Interest on borrowing for war costs is humongous

Interest alone on borrowing to fund Overseas Contingency Operations has been so far $534 billion according to estimates of the Cost of War Project at Brown University.

Neta Crawford author of the report of the project and a political science professor at Boston University said: .“Even if the U.S. stopped spending on war at the end of this fiscal year, interest costs alone on borrowing to pay for the wars will continue to grow apace. By 2056, a conservative estimate is that interest costs will be about $8 trillion unless the U.S. changes the way that it pays for the wars.”

Congress committees pass $700 billion defense bill for 2018

The bill was passed by the Armed Service Committees of both the House and the Senate. The total amount is $85 billion more than the 2011 Budget Control Act allows.

Although Senator David Perdue (R-Georgia) claimed that the greatest threat to U.S. security was the national debt, he also argued that the Republican tax cuts were not increasing the problem. He called the cuts a short-term investment.

Perdue said: “You can’t fix this long-term problem unless you grow the economy and you’re not going to grow the economy unless you fix taxes."

Even if Democrats manage to block the Republican tax cuts the way in which U.S. overseas wars are funded still requires change.

Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies notes that earlier the U.S. had a relatively low debt but now that has changed and there will be downward pressure on defense budgets: “I think we’re in a different place now than we were in 2001. All of these factors did not exist then and now start to conspire to depress defense spending. They very well may weigh on the defense budget in the 2020s…Then when you combine that with tax cuts which are also going to make the deficit higher, it’s all putting downward pressure on defense budgets.”

Yet, US presence is continuing in both Iraq and Afghanistan and all signs are that borrowing will continue as before.

Published earlier in Digital Journal

In last thirteen years US has spent $1.6 trillion on war-making.

In the 13 years since the September 11 attacks, the Congressional Research Office (CRS) estimates that the U.S. has spent $1.6 trillion on making war. The total is to the end of September 2014 the end of the fiscal year for the US government.

The expenses include the following: ".. the cost of military operations, the training of security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, weapons maintenance, base support, reconstruction, embassy maintenance, foreign aid, and veterans' medical care, as well as war-related intelligence operations not tracked by the Pentagon. " While the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq and now most from Afghanistan have reduced expenses, funding continues at very high levels in spite of across-the-board spending cuts in March of 2013. The sequestration cuts came from the Defense Department's regular peace-time budget.

 There is a separate budget for Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) the new-fangled name adopted for the now out-of-fashion Global War on Terror: A March 2011 Congressional report[186] estimated spending related to the war through fiscal year 2011 at $1.2 trillion, and that spending through 2021 assuming a reduction to 45,000 troops would be $1.8 trillion. A June 2011 academic report[186] covering additional areas of spending related to the war estimated it through 2011 at $2.7 trillion, and long term spending at $5.4 trillion including interest. In the budget for 2015 the US Congress actually gave more for war-making activities than was requested by the Obama administration: "The Administration's FY 2015 request of $71.4 billion should have set the bar for war spending, and appropriators even cut more than $4 billion from two initiatives in the request. Instead of using this $67 billion total, lawmakers increased war spending to $73.7 billion, nearly $7 billion above what otherwise would have been the case." The Congress is even more reluctant to cut military spending than the Obama administration.

 The CRS estimate of costs does not include the costs of medical care for veterans who are disabled, and some other costs. Neta Crawford, of Boston University, puts the potential costs of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars plus assistance to Pakistan since 2001 at $4.4 trillion. This includes $316 billion in interest costs plus another $1 trillion in costs for veteran's care through 2054. The appended video shows the cost per day, hour, and even minute. Crawford's paper on the costs can be found here.

The Pentagon's limitless slush fund

The Pentagon has issued warnings that with recent cuts it is facing a money crunch made much worse by the new missions in Iraq and Syria.

As a way of saving money the Pentagon does not suggest scaling back on overseas intervention. Instead the military has suggested that military wages should be limited to raises of one per cent and health care coverage should be overhauled. The cost of living adjustments for military retirees will be cut below the level of inflation. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments(CSBA) in Washington DC estimates that the defense budget could face as much as $300 billion in mandatory budget cuts soon. However, the Pentagon has a way around that problem. The Overseas Contingency Operations(OCO) account serves as a credit card with no limits as apply on consumer credit cards.Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the CSBA notes: “There is currently no limit on OCO, so there is as much room as they need."
 The operations are mostly part of the war on terror. However, "the war on terror" has been branded as politically incorrect some time ago so now there are just overseas contingency operations. The change was initiated in March of 2009: In a memo e-mailed this week to Pentagon staff members, the Defense Department's office of security review noted that "this administration prefers to avoid using the term 'Long War' or 'Global War on Terror' [GWOT.] Please use 'Overseas Contingency Operation.' "
 The OCO account is separate from the base defense budget and is exempt from spending reductions under Budget Sequestration set to remain in place until 2021 under the sequestration laws. Even with sequestration cuts the 2014 military budget that was originally to be capped at $498.1 billion is now at over $520 billion. This does not include $80 billion additional spent in Afghanistan. Military spending will increase by $22 billion in 2014 and $31.7 over the next years. Of course none of this includes that OCO credit card debt.
 Even some Democrats have described the OCO as simply a slush fund. For example, Representative Barbara Lee a Democrat of California said: "The Overseas Contingency Operations is slush fund. It's a gimmick to avoid the budget cuts that are punishing other critical areas of the budget like education and health. Fundamentally, it is a black box of unchecked federal spending that needs to be eliminated. All DOD programs should be funded from the base-budget which is more than sufficient." Recently, Congress passed a bill that will fund the government through December 11th this year. As part of the legislation the lawmakers put $85 billion in the OCO for the 2015 year. This was $26 billion more than Obama had asked for. The slush fund obviously requires a lot of slush.
 Fighting the Islamic State is costing up to $10 million a day according to the Pentagon. A recent estimate puts the cost at as much as $8.6 billion a year. The CSBA estimates the yearly cost at a lower $2.4 to $3.8 a year but only at the current level of air strikes. Although Obama continues to claim that there will be no boots on the ground in Iraq, there are already 1600 advisers in Iraq. Gordon Adams an analyst with the Stimson Center claims that the Congress will "almost certainly" fund the fight against the Islamic State using money in the OCO.
 While the US taxpayer will ultimately be forced to pay the bill for all these extra expenditures, US arms manufacturers stand to make windfall profits as shown by the recent increase in their stock prices as reported in this article. The recent bombing in Iraq provides a good example of creative destruction that will provide a great stimulus for the military-industrial complex: Ironically, dozens of the U.S. airstrikes have targeted American-made Humvees, mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles and other armored vehicles that Islamic State fighters captured as they overran Iraqi military bases and airfields during their blitz across northern Iraq this year. The new government in Baghdad is scrambling to rebuild its battered army and will need to buy replacement vehicles.

US global military role drains dollars needed domestically

The U.S. spends far more than any other country in the world on defense. While the US will be withdrawing more troops from Afghanistan, it is nevertheless increasing its involvement in numerous countries including new activity in Iraq.

Eric Margolis in a recent article points to the many areas that the US feels it is necessary to be involved militarily including Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and in the Ukraine among many other places. As Margolis points out, trying to defend everything may be a losing proposition: To quote Frederick the Great, “he who defends everything, defends nothing.” To which we may add, he who spends on wars everywhere, ends up broke. And he who ignores domestic needs for the sake of imperial glory abroad is cruising for a bruising.  

 Margolis notes that Obama is being pressured by the media and hawkish Republican politicians to attack in Syria and confront the Russians in Eastern Ukraine. Margolis applauds Obama's decision not to act in haste without having a clear understanding of the results. Margolis refers to the old saw that fools rush in where angels fear to tread. He claims that Washington has messed up in the past with its interventionist policy. The best plan in many situations might be to do nothing at all or at least leave it to other parties to take action. 

The US lost a long war in Vietnam. The results of a decades long war in Afghanistan and a long occupation of Iraq or even the regime change in Libya are hardly indications that US intervention has been a huge success. Some US hawks seem to think that the solution is to stay longer, spend more money, and lose more US lives. 

 Margolis claims that Iraq bombing even at present costs about $7.5 million daily or over a half billion since June. Almost 8,000 US troops were killed in action in the Afghan and Iraq wars.

The cost of medical care and pensions for troops is enormous. The costs climb long after conflict a particular war may be over as a recent study showed: ".. the cost of caring for Vietnam and first Gulf War veterans is still climbing. But the bill for Iraq and Afghanistan is likely going to be steeper still due to higher rates of survival, more generous benefits and more expensive medical treatments. Of the 1.56 million troops that have been discharged, over half applied to receive lifetime disability payments.. "  

 An article in the Washington Post suggests that Washington needs to beef up its expense budget at the same time as it cuts out some spending such as too generous benefits for veterans. Given the scandals about veteran's medical treatment, as the article mentions, it will be a hard political sell to cut spending in these areas because of the "powerful lobbies" involved: Every dollar spent on health benefits for retirees is a dollar we can’t spend training and equipping men and women to deal with the Islamic State, Putin and other threats. The moral appears to be that money should be spent liberally to prepare members of the armed forces to fight and risk their lives but after they have served, been wounded or retired, the government should pinch pennies to spend on a new batch. 

The article notes that military pensions represented a $51 billion expenditure in 2014 and was expected to grow to $62 billion in 2024. Even if the size of the US armed forces actually shrinks in the future these costs will still rise for some time. The health care costs in the military budget are expected to rise from $49 billion in 2014 to $70 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars in 2028. Obviously this is another area the article suggests that is ripe for reform. While the article stresses that a dollar spent on health care or pensions is a dollar that is not spent on training and equipping service members to fight in the myriad locations the US sees action is required, those dollars also are lost to alternative uses such as increasing expenditure on education. Finland is able to provide free post-secondary education for all of its citizens. The US with all its wealth saddles many of its students with enormous debts.

 According to CIA figures the US spent 640 billion on defense or 4.35 percent of its GDP, the most in the world, while Finland spent 1.47 percent even though it is right next door to Russia. The total global expenditure in 2012 was $1747 trillion so one out of every three dollars spent on defense is by the US.  

US infrastructure is in dire need of repair.The United States spent roughly $100 billion less (in real terms, that is, discounting for inflation) on infrastructure in 2012 than it did in 2002. States 

only spend 5 percent of their budgets on transportation. Spending on mass transit has gone up, but we are still spending about $25 billion less than we need to. The American Water Works Association estimates that about $1 trillion will be needed for urgent pipe repairs over the next twenty-five years. The Highway Trust Fund is on track to run up a $77 billion deficit by 2019. These are just a few examples of the many infrastructure programs that are woefully underfunded. 

Every dollar spent on defense is a dollar that cannot be spent on health care, education, and infrastructure, or helping cities such as Detroit to come out of bankruptcy. Terrorists will not need to attack the US homeland. The expense of trying to prevent an attack will ensure that America's infrastructure simply falls apart. Bridges are already collapsing. Apparently events such as these are not a threat to US security.

AFRICOM and U.S. Global Military Agenda

This article gives a detailed account of the U.S. agenda in Africa and how it is involved in so many countries there. The program is so large that it is not surprising that a separate AFRICOM command has been set up to co-ordinate activities. All of this helps protect US investment and to project its power throughout Africa where the US is in competition with other countries such as China. This military empire is hugely expensive and a drain on scarce US resources when the US debt is going through the roof. Terrorism may very well win the war on terror simply by bankrupting the US or at the very least ensuring that the US pays for its war on terror by having a lower standard of living at home.

AFRICOM and America's Global Military Agenda: Taking The Helm Of The Entire World
By Rick Rozoff
Global Research, October 27, 2009
Stop NATO - 2009-10-22
“The developments come as the White House seeks grounds to establish a major military presence in Africa….[A]nalysts caution that similar pretexts were used to justify the US invasion of Afghanistan, the missile attacks in Pakistan, and its waning military operations in Iraq, where the civilian population continues to bear the brunt of the US intervention.”
“AFRICOM facilitates the United States advancing on the African continent, taking control of the Eurasian continent and proceeding to take the helm of the entire globe.”—————————
October 1st marked the one-year anniversary of the activation of the first U.S. overseas military command in a quarter of a century, Africa Command (AFRICOM).
AFRICOM was established as a temporary command under the wing of U.S. European Command (EUCOM) a year earlier and launched as an independent entity on October 1, 2008.
Its creation signalled several important milestones in plans by the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies to expand into all corners of the earth and to achieve military, political and economic hegemony in the Southern as well as the Northern Hemisphere.
AFRICOM is the first American regional military command established outside of North America in the post-Cold War era. (The Pentagon set up Northern Command, NORTHCOM, in 2002 after the September 11, 2001 attacks to take in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.)
Its area of responsibility includes more nations – 53 – than any other U.S. military command. By way of comparison, EUCOM includes 51 nations, among which are 19 new nations emerging from the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and the reunification of Germany.
The Pacific Command (PACOM) incorporates 36 countries in its theater of operations, down four since the creation of AFRICOM.
Central Command (CENTCOM) currently includes 20 nations in what is referred to as the Broader Middle East.
Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) covers 32 states, 19 in Central and South America and 13 in the Caribbean, of which 14 are U.S. and European territories.
AFRICOM is also the only new U.S. regional military command absorbing nations formerly in other commands; in fact in all other commands outside the Western Hemisphere.
EUCOM ceded 42 nations (including Western Sahara, a member of the African Union whose recognition has been virulently opposed by the West since Morocco invaded it in 1975) to AFRICOM.
The Horn of Africa region (Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan) was transferred from CENTCOM to AFRICOM, with the former picking up Lebanon and Syria from EUCOM in return. Egypt is the sole African nation still in CENTCOM. The Pentagon’s Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa, which includes Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, the Seychelles, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Yemen, the last on the Arabian Peninsula, was also transferred from CENTCOM to AFRICOM. The U.S. has an estimated 2,000 troops stationed in Djibouti at Camp Lemonier which hosts the Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa.
PACOM lost the Indian Ocean island nations of the Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius and the Seychelles to Africa Command.
Africa is, lastly, the first new continent targeted by the Pentagon for a comprehensive military structure, as the U.S. created comparable commands in Asia, Europe and Latin America after World War II and during the Cold War and had fought wars in all three areas by 1918. With the exception of the bombing of Libya in 1986 and military operations in Somalia in the early 1990s and by proxy since 2006, Africa has to date escaped direct American military intervention. And until the acquisition of Camp Lemonier in Djibouti in early 2001, before September 11, there was no permanent U.S. military installation on the continent.
The beginning of AFRICOM’s second year has witnessed major military exercises on the western and eastern ends of the continent.
On September 29 AFRICOM led the militaries of 30 African nations in the ten-day Africa Endeavor 2009 maneuvers in Gabon off the coast of the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea. “The U.S. military has begun an exercise in the African nation of Gabon…to improve command and control between forces for possible peacekeeping or anti-terrorism missions.
“Africom…is sponsoring the exercise and much of the instruction is done by U.S. military personnel based in Europe and the United States.” [1]
Coordinated with the command out of which AFRICOM arose, “The AFRICOM exercise comes on the heels of a similar U.S. European Command-sponsored operation – Combined Endeavor – that tested the communication compatibility of the U.S. and its European allies.” [2]
The Gabon-based exercise reprised the previous year’s Africa Endeavor which was run by European Command before AFRICOM’s formal activation and which included “21 African nations, the African Union, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Sweden and the United States.
“Nations and organizations who participated…were Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Sweden, Uganda, the United States and Zambia….” [3]
The Pentagon participated with personnel from “U.S. Marine Forces Europe (MARFOREUR); U.S. Air Forces in Europe, Public Affairs; First Combat Communications Squadron, Ramstein Air Force Base; 8th Communications Battalion, Camp Lejeune; Marine Headquarters History, Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa; U.S. European Command (EUCOM); U.S. African Command (AFRICOM); and the Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC).” [4]
This year’s maneuvers effected the formal transfer of Africa from European Command to the new Africa Command.
From October 16-25 the U.S. is heading a multinational military exercise, Natural Fire 10, in Uganda in which “More than 1,000 American and East African troops are…deployed…as the United States carries out its biggest military exercise in Africa this year.” [5]
Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi are to provide troops to join 450 U.S. military personnel in drills which “involve live fire in the field as well as convoy operations, crowd control and vehicle checkpoints….” [6]
An African newspaper account of the exercises suggests ulterior motives: “[T]he decision to site the exercise in northern Uganda raises questions about whether it may presage a renewed US-supported assault against the Lord’s Resistance Army,” which has waged an armed rebellion against the Ugandan government since 1987.
The same source continued with these observations:
“The exercise in northern Uganda is scheduled to begin one week after the conclusion of another US-led military exercise in Gabon.
“Nearly 30 African nations – including Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda – took part in that communications-focused initiative led by the US Africa Command….Together, these exercises are cited by Africom’s critics as further indications of what they describe as the growing militarisation of the US presence in Africa.
“Situating the exercise in Uganda reflects the close military relationship that the United States has developed with that East African country….
“Worries persist in Africa that the Pentagon intends to station large numbers of US troops on the continent, despite denials by Africom’s leaders that such a move is being planned.
“The United States already maintains about 2,000 troops at a base in Djibouti. This Joint Task Force/Horn of Africa detachment is the source of some of the US soldiers, sailors and Marines who will participate in Natural Fire 10.” [7]
Two days after the above was published a Ugandan newspaper announced that “Hundreds of Rwandan and Burundi troops have arrived in the country for joint military training exercises geared towards the formation of the first Joint East African Military Force.
“The training, which will also have troops from Kenya and Tanzania with experts from the US, will be conducted in Kitgum….Last week, the UPDF [Uganda Peoples Defence Force] said it supports the formation of a joint regional army, believing this will handle conflicts in the region.
“The proposal was mooted during a meeting of delegates from the five member countries in Kampala early this month.” [8]
The Pentagon is setting up a new African regional military force.
On October 20 a Rwandan news source revealed that “The visiting US commander of US Army Africa, Maj. Gen. William B. Garrett III, has stressed that the US army is interested in strengthening its cooperation with the Rwandan Defence Force (RDF).”
Garrett was quoted as saying “We are hoping to improve the relationship between Rwandan Defence Forces and the US army – this involves increase in interaction between our forces….Likewise, we hope that the Rwandan Defence Forces can also participate in our exercises. So we are hoping to increase the level of cooperation between the US and the Rwandan Defense forces.” [9]
The U.S. and its allies previously deployed Rwandan troops they trained and armed to Darfur and Somalia.
In northwest Africa, on October 20 the U.S. ambassador to Mali presented the latest tranche of “more than $5 million in new vehicles and other equipment” to the armed forces of his host country. [10]
Two years earlier the Pentagon led a multinational military exercise, Operation Flintlock 2007, in the capital of Mali with troops from thirteen African and European nations.
In the prototype exercise, Flintlock 2005, the U.S. deployed over 1,000 Special Operations troops, Green Berets, for joint military maneuvers with counterparts from Senegal, Niger, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Algeria and Tunisia.
Flintlock 2005 was employed to launch Washington’s Trans Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative with Algeria, Burkina Faso, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal. An American news report of the exercise bore the title “U.S. Said Eying Sahara For New War Front.” [11]
An official with the U.S. Special Operations Command Europe said at the time, “This is just the start of decades worth of work in Africa,” [12] a sentiment echoed by an American armed forces publication which wrote “If military planners have their way, U.S. troops are going to be deploying to Africa for years or maybe decades.” [13]
Within days of the completion of the 2007 exercise in Mali a U.S. military cargo plane, “flying food to Malian troops fighting rebels in the far north of the country,” was hit by gunfire. The plane had remained in the nation after Flintlock 2007.
“Malian troops had become surrounded at their base in the Tin-Zaouatene region near the Algerian border by armed fighters and couldn’t get supplies….[T]he Mali government asked the U.S. forces to perform the airdrops….” [14]
The fighters in question were ethnic Tuaregs.
Tuaregs in Mali and Niger, “whose armies have received U.S. counter-insurgency training,” have “taken up arms…driven by resentment over unresolved grievances and against what they see as interference in their territories by government armies and foreign companies.” [15]
What is in fact the reason for the heightened American military role in Mali and Niger rather than the Pentagon’s by now standard claim – alleged al-Qaeda threats – was mentioned in a Reuters dispatch of last year.
“The stakes are rising. We’ve got companies, beyond gold exploration [Mali is Africa's third largest gold producer], wanting to explore for oil in northern Mali.
“There has been significant interest by investors wanting to explore for oil in Timbuktu (and other northern towns)….If oil is eventually discovered, that could of course play a role.” [16]
The report from which the above is quoted also said: “Tuareg tribesmen in neighbouring Niger…launched a fresh rebellion early last year, demanding greater autonomy and a bigger slice of revenues from French-operated uranium mines in their traditional fiefdom around the northern town of Agadez.” [17]
Last year the Red Cross reported that 1,000 Tuareg civilians fled into neighboring Burkina Faso to escape a U.S.-supported Malian government offensive.
AFRICOM’s mission in the region, as with much of the rest of Africa, is to wage counterinsurgency campaigns to secure vital resources including gold, precious stones, oil, natural gas and uranium.
The infamous Niger “yellow cake” forgeries played a decisive role in U.S. propaganda leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Off the eastern coast of Africa “The US has supplied the Seychelles with drone spy planes….Seychelles officials say the planes will be used for surveillance, but did not say how many aircraft the US would be handing over….The move comes a day after the US gave equipment to Mali to fight insurgents.” [18]
A Middle Eastern website put together several components of AFRICOM’s plans in rendering this analysis:
“The United States is taking its military venture in Africa to new levels amid suspicions that Washington could be advancing yet another hidden agenda. American operatives are expected to fly pilotless surveillance aircraft over [Seychelles] territory from US ships off its coast….Washington has also started to equip Mali with USD 4.5 million worth of military vehicles and communications equipment, in what is reported to be an increasing US involvement in Africa.
“The developments come as the White House seeks grounds to establish a major military presence in Africa….[A]nalysts caution that similar pretexts were used to justify the US invasion of Afghanistan, the missile attacks in Pakistan, and its waning military operations in Iraq, where the civilian population continues to bear the brunt of the US intervention.” [19]
The same news site reported two days earlier that a U.S. spy drone had been shot down over the southern Somali port of Kismayu. “Kismayu residents routinely report suspected US drones flying over the port. The drones are believed to be launched from warships in the Indian Ocean.” [20]
It was also reported in a feature titled “US to make Blackwater-style entry into Somalia” that “The grounds have reportedly been established for armed American presence on Somali soil with a US security firm [Michigan-based CSS Global Inc.] winning a contract in the war-ravaged country.” [21]
The development was characterised as follows: “Washington has been [increasingly] deputizing the companies, which are notorious for misusing their State Department-issued gun licenses as excuses for trigger-ready atrocities. The move has been denounced as an effort at putting a non-military face on the US pursuits in the respective countries.” [22]
Though not part of AFRICOM’s area of responsibility, the African nation of Egypt recently hosted the latest Bright Star war games.
The Pentagon’s website described aspects of this year’s Bright Star, “U.S. Central Command’s longest-running exercise”:
“U.S. Marines and sailors were part of a four-nation coalition that stormed the beaches…during a major amphibious assault demonstration Oct. 12.
“The 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit and the Navy’s Bataan Amphibious Ready Group, as well as the Egyptian army and navy and Pakistani and Kuwaiti marines, took part in the assault as part of Exercise Bright Star 2009, which began Oct. 10 and ends Oct. 20.
“As part of the simulation, Egyptian special operations forces conducted beach reconnaissance prior to the assault. U.S. Marines followed with four AV-88 Harriers. Then amphibious assault vehicles, Humvees and landing craft came ashore….Troops from the various nations, along with 30 vehicles including aircraft, landing craft, amphibious assault vehicles and amphibious tracked vehicles, participated. [23]
Another American source added: “The coalition of military forces participating in the exercises also includes France, Greece, Italy, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.
“During the past week, Fort Bragg soldiers made parachute jumps with Egyptian, German, Kuwaiti and Pakistani soldiers.” [24]
AFRICOM was nurtured by U.S. European Command since then U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2002 proposed the creation of a NATO Rapid Response Force (NRF), which was approved by NATO defense chiefs in Brussels in June 2003 and was inaugurated in October 2003. In 2006 Rumsfeld followed up on that initiative by forming a planning team to establish a new Unified Command for the African continent.
The top military commander of EUCOM is simultaneously NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, and the two generals holding those joint positions during preparations for forming and activating AFRICOM were Marine General James Jones (2003-2006) and Army General Bantz John Craddock (2006-June, 2009). The first is now National Security Adviser to the U.S. president.
“[T]he newly formed NRF [NATO Rapid Response Force] carried out its first exercise code named STEADFAST JAGUAR in Cape Verde…in West Africa from 14-28 June 2006.” [25]
“The islanders of Cape Verde are slowly getting used to German armored vehicles and Spanish helicopters descending on their sun-drenched beaches as U.S. fighter F-16 jets roar overhead.
“7,800 troops involved in the maneuvers, the alliance’s first major presence on African soil.” [26]
Reuters reported at the time that “The NATO Steadfast Jaguar exercises are the final test of a 25,000-strong rapid-reaction force due to be ready from October to dive into troublespots around the world and deal with everything from natural disasters to terrorist attacks.”
And it quoted U.S. Lieutenant-Colonel Matt Chestnutt, “whose unit of F-16 fighters was deployed in the 1991 Gulf War and later conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo,” as saying “Africa was a great choice. It is possible the NATO Response Force could come here one day.” [27]
Agence France-Presse was no less effusive in its account of the unprecedented war games, dubbing its report “Military Brass Hail ‘the New NATO’ at Cape Verde War”: “Troops, fighter planes and warships descended on the West African archipelago of Cape Verde as NATO continued major war games this week to test its global rapid-response force.
“Leading politicians and military top brass from the western alliance’s member countries hailed the maneuvers — NATO’s first on African soil — underway on the archipelago’s northern island of Sao Vicente.” [28]
Two months before NATO held a warm-up naval exercise, Brilliant Mariner 2006, ranging from the Netherlands to Norway and consisting of “sixty four ships from eighteen countries…conducting joint warfare inter-operability training in a multi-threat environment,” which was “the final preparation phase before the land, air and maritime components of the NATO Response Force come together in June for the capability demonstration exercise Steadfast Jaguar 2006 in Cape Verde, off the west coast of Africa.” [29]
A month before the NATO global strike force pilot exercise in Cape Verde, Portuguese Foreign Minister Diogo Freitas do Amaral said “the West African archipelago is interested in joining both NATO and the European Union. [30]
The test run for the NATO Rapid Response Force was also conducted off the African mainland. In 2005 the Alliance held the 16-nation Noble Javelin 2005 air force, army and naval exercises in Spain’s Canary Islands off the coasts of Morocco and Western Sahara.
U.S. warships returned to Cape Verde the following year and an American commander said of the event that “These are the types of efforts that are contributing to the CNO’s [Chief of Naval Operations] ‘1000-ship Navy’ initiative.” [31] On Washington’s 1,000-ship Navy, see Proliferation Security Initiative And U.S. 1,000-Ship Navy: Control Of World’s Oceans, Prelude To War. [32]
Also in 2007 it was reported that the “USS Fort McHenry will begin a roughly six-month deployment to Western Africa as the Navy tries a new concept it has dubbed the Global Fleet Station program.” [33]
The Global Fleet Station (GFS) program was elaborated in 2007 in a U.S. combined maritime services release, “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower.”
In June of that year Admiral Harry Ulrich, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Europe, spoke at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies in Washington, D.C. and said “The Global Fleet Station concept is ‘closely aligned’ with the task to be provided by the still-developing U.S. Africa Command.” [34]
Africa, then, is a testing ground for NATO’s Rapid Response Force and the U.S.’s 1,000-ship Navy and Global Fleet Station projects.
Later in 2007, even before AFRICOM was formally announced, Defense News reported that the Pentagon had already decided to divide the continent into five regions: North, south, central, east and west.
“One team will have responsibility for a northern strip from Mauritania to Libya; another will operate in a block of east African nations – Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Kenya, Madagascar and Tanzania; and a third will carry out activities in a large southern block that includes South Africa, Zimbabwe and Angola….A fourth team would concentrate on a group of central African countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad and Congo [Brazzaville]; the fifth regional team would focus on a western block that would cover Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Niger and Western Sahara….” [35]
Before the official inauguration of AFRICOM, analysts around the world sounded the alarm that beneath the innocuous-sounding claims by Washington that it was solely interested in becoming a “security partner” to African nations lurked something more geostrategically significant. And more sinister.
The following are from Nigerian, Algerian and Chinese sources, respectively.
“From the current data on production capacities and proven oil reserves, only two regions appear to exist where, in addition to the Middle East, oil production will grow and where a strategy of diversification may easily work: The Caspian Sea and the Gulf of Guinea.
“The Caspian Sea came into the limelight after the demise of the Soviet Union, and the US has since entered the region and built up a strong military presence on both sides of the lake.
“Some of the problems linked to Caspian oil give the Gulf of Guinea a competitive edge.
“Much of its oil is conveniently located off shore.
“[T]he region enjoys several advantages, including its strategic location just opposite the refineries of the US east coast. It is ahead of all other regions in proven deep water oil reserves, which will lead to significant savings in security provisions. And it requires a drilling technology easily available from the Gulf of Mexico.” [36]
“A major focus of AFRICOM will be the Gulf of Guinea, with its enormous oil reserves in Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Angola and the Congo Republic….The U.S. is already pouring $500 million into its Trans-Sahel Counterterrorism Initiative that embraces Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria in North Africa, and nations boarding the Sahara including Mauritania, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Chad and Senegal.” [37]
“By building a dozen forefront bases or establishments in Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and other African nations, the U.S. will gradually establish a network of military bases to cover the entire continent and make essential preparations for docking an aircraft carrier fleet in the region.
“The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) with the U.S. at the head…carried out a large-scale military exercise in Cape Verde, a western African island nation, with the sole purpose for control of the sea and air corridor of crude oil extracting zones and to monitor the situation with oil pipelines operating there.
“[The US} is also seeking to set up small military facilities in Senegal, Ghana and Mali, so as to facilitate its interference in the oil-rich African nations....[T]he African Command represents a vital, crucial link for the US adjustment of its global military deployment.
“At present, it moves the gravity of its forces in Europe eastward and opens new bases in East Europe.
“Africa is flanked by Eurasia, with its northern part located at the juncture of the Asian, European and African continents. The present US global military redeployment centers mainly on an ‘arc of instability’ from the Caucasus, Central and Southern Asia down to the Korean Peninsula….
“AFRICOM facilitates the United States advancing on the African continent, taking control of the Eurasian continent and proceeding to take the helm of the entire globe.” [38]
The third set of observations is from a director of the Chinese Army’s Academy of Military Sciences. That is, from an authority expected to be familiar with world geopolitical dynamics and trends.
He situates America’s military drive into Africa, all of Africa, within an integrated global context, as does the Nigerian commentary that preceded his analysis once removed.
The campaign to subjugate an entire continent with its more than one billion inhabitants to Western military and economic demands is an integral and milestone component of broader designs around the world. Starting with the Balkans and Eastern Europe as a whole after the breakup of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S. and its NATO allies have relentlessly pursued plans to penetrate and dominate the former Eastern bloc, former Soviet space, the Broader Middle East, the Arctic Circle and Greater Antarctica and to reclaim and solidify control of Latin America and Oceania.
AFRICOM and complementary NATO initiatives are an exponential advancement of the campaign by the West to reassert and expand global supremacy by targeting a continent at the crossroads of north and south, west and east, and the industrial and the developing worlds. As an earlier citation mentioned, it is also the meeting place of three continents and the Middle East with coasts on two of the world’s oceans and three of its seas.
Notes1) Associated Press, September 30, 20092) Stars and Stripes, October 4, 20093) United States European Command, July 29, 20084) United States European Command, July 16, 20085) The East African, October 12, 20096) Ibid7) Ibid8) The Monitor, October 14, 20099) The New Times, October 20, 200910) Associated Press, October 21, 200911) United Press International, December 28, 200512) Stars And Stripes, May 15, 200513) Stars And Stripes, July 17, 200514) Stars and Stripes, September 18, 200715) Reuters, May 23, 200816) Reuters, June 6, 200817) Ibid18) BBC News, October 21, 200919) Press TV, October 21, 200920) Press TV, October 19, 200921) Press TV, October 16, 200922) Ibid23) U.S. Department of Defense, American Forces Press Service, October 14, 200924) Fayetteville Observer, October 4, 200925) Leadership (Nigeria), November 22, 200726) Reuters, June 29, 200627) Ibid28) Agence France-Presse, June 23, 200629) NATO, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, April 5, 200630) Reuters, May 19, 200631) Navy NewsStand, April 11, 200732) Stop NATO, January 29, 2009http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/proliferation-security-initiative-and-us-1000-ship-navy-control-of-worlds-oceans-prelude-to-war 33) Stars and Stripes, June 14, 200734) Ibid35) Defense News, September 20, 200736) Abba Mahmood, Country, Gulf of Guinea And Africom Leadership, November 22, 200737) U.S. embassies turned into command posts in North Africa Ech Chorouk, October 17, 200738) Lin Zhiyuan, deputy office director of the People’s Liberation Army Academy of Military Sciences, U.S. moves to step up militaryinfiltration in AfricaPeople’s Daily, February 26, 2007
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Financing the Imperial Armed Forces

The agreement on expanding the military and military expenditures between Democrats and Republicans is astonishing to me. Perhaps the power of the military-industrial lobby is so strong that neither party can stomach attacking it. Since public opinion is actually somewhat negative towards the amount being spent--and that without anyone questioning it to any degree--it would make a good entrance point for a third party. In fact the two main parties are so Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee in the US that the time might be ripe for the entrance of a third party. Problem is it would be broke, not given air time, etc.

Financing the Imperial Armed Forces
A Trillion Dollars and Nowhere to Go but Up
By Robert Dreyfuss

War critics are rightly disappointed over the inability of congressional Democrats to mount an effective challenge to President Bush's Iraq adventure. What began as a frontal assault on the war, with tough talk about deadlines and timetables, has settled into something like a guerrilla-style campaign to chip away at war policy until the edifice crumbles.

Still, Democratic criticism of administration policy in Iraq looks muscle-bound when compared with the Party's readiness to go along with the President's massive military buildup, domestically and globally. Nothing underlines the tacit alliance between so-called foreign-policy realists and hard-line exponents of neoconservative-style empire-building more than the Washington consensus that the United States needs to expand the budget of the Defense Department without end, while increasing the size of the U.S. Armed Forces. In addition, spending on the 16 agencies and other organizations that make up the official U.S. "intelligence community" or IC -- including the CIA -- and on homeland security is going through the roof.

The numbers are astonishing and, except for a hardy band of progressives in the House of Representatives, Democrats willing to call for shrinking the bloated Pentagon or intelligence budgets are essentially nonexistent. Among presidential candidates, only Rep. Dennis Kucinich and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson even mention the possibility of cutting the defense budget. Indeed, presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are, at present, competing with each other in their calls for the expansion of the Armed Forces. Both are supporting manpower increases in the range of 80,000 to 100,000 troops, mostly for the Army and the Marines. (The current, Bush-backed authorization for fiscal year 2008 calls for the addition of 65,000 more Army recruits and 27,000 Marines by 2012.)

How astonishing are the budgetary numbers? Consider the trajectory of U.S. defense spending over the last nearly two decades. From the end of the Cold War into the mid-1990s, defense spending actually fell significantly. In constant 1996 dollars, the Pentagon's budget dropped from a peacetime high of $376 billion, at the end of President Ronald Reagan's military buildup in 1989, to a low of $265 billion in 1996. (That compares to post-World War II wartime highs of $437 billion in 1953, during the Korean War, and $388 billion in 1968, at the peak of the War in Vietnam.) After the Soviet empire peacefully disintegrated, the 1990s decline wasn't exactly the hoped-for "peace dividend," but it wasn't peanuts either.

However, since September 12th, 2001, defense spending has simply exploded. For 2008, the Bush administration is requesting a staggering $650 billion, compared to the already staggering $400 billion the Pentagon collected in 2001. Even subtracting the costs of the ongoing "Global War on Terrorism" -- which is what the White House likes to call its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- for FY 2008, the Pentagon will still spend $510 billion. In other words, even without the President's two wars, defense spending will have nearly doubled since the mid-1990s. Given that the United States has literally no significant enemy state to fight anywhere on the planet, this represents a remarkable, if perverse, achievement. As a famous Democratic politician once asked: Where is the outrage?

Neocons, war profiteers, and hardliners of all stripes still argue that the "enemy" we face is a nonexistent bugaboo called "Islamofascism." It's easy to imagine them laughing into their sleeves while they continue to claim that the way to battle low-tech, rag-tag bands of leftover Al Qaeda crazies is by spending billions of dollars on massively expensive, massively powerful, futuristic weapons systems.

As always, a significant part of the defense bill is eaten up by these big-ticket items. According to the reputable Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, there are at least 28 pricey weapons systems that, just by themselves, will rack up a whopping $44 billion in 2008. The projected cost of these 28 systems -- which include fighter jets, the B-2 bomber, the V-22 Osprey, various advanced naval vessels, cruise-missile systems, and the ultra-expensive aircraft carriers the Navy always demands -- will, in the end, be more than $1 trillion. And that's not even including the Star Wars missile-defense system, which at the moment soaks up about $11 billion a year.

By one count, U.S. defense spending in 2008 will amount to 29 times the combined military spending of all six so-called rogue states: Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. The United States accounts for almost half -- approximately 48% -- of the entire world's spending on what we like to call "defense." Again, according to the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, U.S. defense spending this year amounts to exactly twice the combined military spending of the next six biggest military powers: China, Russia, the U.K., France, Japan, and Germany.

Despite this, like presidential candidates Clinton and Obama, the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council is pushing hard to tie the party to increased military spending. Writes journalist Aaron Glantz:


"'America needs a bigger and better military,' reads an October report by Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute, the policy arm of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council that counts Senators Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Evan Bayh (D-IN) among its members.

"'Escalating conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched the all-volunteer force to the breaking point,' the report says. 'Democrats should step forward with a plan to repair the damage, by adding more troops, replenishing depleted stocks of equipment, and reorganizing the force around the new missions of unconventional warfare, counterinsurgency, and civil reconstruction.'"


So hostile is the atmosphere in Congress to cuts of any sort in military spending that even a recent effort by traditional defense critics to suggest ways to reorient the Pentagon's budgetary priorities turned out to involve but the most modest of rebalancings. A coalition of these critics from organizations such as the Institute for Policy Studies, the Center for American Progress, and other left and left-center groups, including such experts as Larry Korb of CAP, Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives, and William Hartung of the World Policy Institute, suggested cutting $56 billion from offensive weapons systems, but then proposed to shift fully $50 billion of it into areas such as homeland security, international peacekeeping, and "nation building."

Why, exactly, we need to increase Pentagon spending even in those categories is mystifying, since no country is actually threatening us and -- if the Iraqi and Afghani wars were settled -- the problem of terrorism could be adequately dealt with by mobilizing relatively modest numbers of CIA officers and FBI and law enforcement agents. The fact that such respected defense critics feel compelled to put forward such a lame proposal is a sign of our crimped times; a sign that, pragmatically speaking, it is simply verboten to criticize Pentagon bloat, even given the current, Democrat-controlled Congress. It's not that the public is pro-military spending either. Indeed, in a Gallup Poll conducted in February, fully 43% of Americans said they believed that the United States is spending "too much" on defense, while only 20% said "too little." Rather, it's a sign that the political class -- perhaps swayed by the influence of the military-industrial complex and its army of lobbyists -- hasn't yet caught up to public opinion.

And it's important to keep in mind that the official Pentagon budget doesn't begin to tell the full story of American "defense" spending. In addition to the $650 billion that the Pentagon will get in 2008, huge additional sums will be spent on veterans care and interest on the national debt accumulated from previous DOD spending that ballooned the deficit. In all, those two accounts add $263 billion to the Pentagon budget, for a grand total of $913 billion.

Then there are the intelligence and homeland security budgets. Back in the 1990s, when I started reporting on the CIA and the U.S. intelligence community, its entire budget was about $27 billion. Last year, although the number is supposed to be top secret, the Bush administration revealed that intelligence spending had reached $44 billion. For 2008, according to media reports, Congress is working on an authorization of $48 billion for our spies.

Again, when I first wrote about "homeland security" in the late 1990s -- it was then called "counterterrorism" -- the Clinton administration was spending $17 billion in interagency budgets in this area. For 2008, the budget of the Department of Homeland Security -- that mishmash, incompetent agency hurriedly assembled under pressure from uber-hawk Joe Lieberman (even the Bush administration was initially opposed to its creation) -- will be $46.4 billion.

To a rational observer, such spending -- totaling more than $1 trillion in 2008, according to the figures I've just cited -- seems quite literally insane. During the Cold War, hawks scared Americans into tolerating staggering but somewhat lesser sums by invoking the specter of Soviet Communism. Does anyone, anywhere, truly believe that we need to spend more than a trillion dollars a year to defend ourselves against small bands of al-Qaeda fanatics?

Robert Dreyfuss, an independent journalist in the Washington, D.C. area and Rolling Stone magazine's national security correspondent, is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. He writes frequently for Rolling Stone, The American Prospect, The Nation, Mother Jones, and the Washington Monthly. His web site is RobertDreyfuss.com.


Copyright 2007 Robert Dreyfuss

Russia feels threatened by US militarism

Here is a view from Russia. The US just seems to ignore the fact that it is natural for countries such as China and Russia to regard the huge military buildup of the US as a direct threat to them.

Russia is not a clay pigeon on an American shooting range
16:42 | 09/ 02/ 2007



MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Vladimir Simonov) - According to the Western media, "Russian special forces used images of the poisoned former spy Alexander Litvinenko as target practice." I can understand their concern, as permitting such a folly would be absolutely amoral.

I can also understand the outrage of millions of Russians on learning on Friday morning that the Pentagon has put up Russia's image on the army shooting range. Moreover, it appears that Americans are prepared to fire live missiles if they consider the danger coming from Russia excessive.

This is how I interpret the following statement by Pentagon chief Robert Gates about Russia as an adversary.

"We need the full range of military capabilities," including ground combat forces to battle large armies and nimble special operations troops to scout out terrorist threats, Gates told the House Armed Services Committee. "We don't know what's going to develop in places like Russia and China, in North Korea, in Iran and elsewhere," he said.

Did Gates add Russia to the "axis of evil" by mistake? I don't think so, as he said some time later that in addition to waging a war on global terror, the Untied States needed to confront threats created by the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea, and unclear positions of such countries as Russia and China, which are also building up their armaments.

I don't know about China, but Gates chose a really bad time for berating Russia. Several days ago, President George W. Bush presented to Congress a draft federal budget for the 2008 fiscal year, where $700 billion out of the $2.9 trillion total is earmarked for defense, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the buildup of American forces, and the development of expensive missile systems.

So, is it the military buildup in Russia, whose defense budget is at least 25 times smaller than the American one, that is alarming Washington or vice versa? Had the Kremlin applied the same alarm scale to the U.S. military buildup, the humankind would have started crying wolf by now.

I was shocked by Gates' reference to the vague positions of countries such as Russia. I cannot believe that Robert Gates, a specialist on the Soviet Union and Soviet leadership, especially of the Gorbachev-Yeltsin era, a one-time White House Russia analyst, and a former CIA director, has any doubts about the Kremlin's current position.

In December 2006, he thought Russia's position was clear enough to explain it in Senate during his nomination hearing. "I think that what Putin is trying to do, frankly, is re-establish Russia as a great power," Gates said. "And I think Putin is trying to restore the pride of Russia. I think he has a lot of popular support at home for the things he's trying to do."

Many people thought Gates would speak for the U.S. administration's more realistic "dove" faction, including as regards relations with Russia. He promised to be quite unlike his neo-conservative predecessor Donald Rumsfeld and former U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton.

Idealists were jubilant, sincerely believing that the advocates of the "American age" theory of changing the world according to American values were ceding their positions in Washington. They thought the hawks were being replaced with more tolerant people respecting other countries' opinions, such as Bob Gates.

The first to fall prey to that illusion were American analysts, who heralded a forthcoming thaw in relations with Russia.

Dr. Ariel Cohen, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said that now that Gates had become part of the administration, an attempt would be made to promote military and military-technical cooperation with Russia.

Unfortunately Cohen was wrong. Washington intends to deploy ballistic missile launchers and radars in Poland and the Czech Republic, and has moved the world's largest Sea-Based X-Band Radar from Hawaii to the Aleutians in the Bering Sea, off Kamchatka.

John Michael "Mike" McConnell, the newly appointed Director of National Intelligence (DNI), has promised to pay more attention to Russia. He has created a "mission manager" position to focus on Russia. The focus of current mission manager positions also includes Cuba and Venezuela, North Korea, Iran, Iraq and counterterrorism.

And lastly, Gates said last Thursday that the U.S. army should prepare for a war against Russia.

What has happened to the strategic partnership between the White House and the Kremlin?

This is a multifaceted problem, with one core element. The painful American failures in Iraq, the aborted attempt to turn the Broader Middle East into a testing ground for the Western model of democracy, and the flop of the neo-conservative doctrine of "a new American age" are pushing the U.S. administration to search for external reasons for failure, that is, somebody to blame for American mistakes.

In that situation, Russia with its growing economy, an image of the world's largest energy supplier, and the new confidence of its leaders seemed like an easy "clay pigeon" for the American shooting range.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and may not necessarily represent the opinions of the editorial board.

Cost of troop buildup not in budget

It seems reasonable to think that some day the huge costs of US military spending must cause difficulties within the economy. The US is engaged in excessive military Keynesianism to keep its economy expanding.


Cost of troop buildup not in budget
By Peter Spiegel
Times Staff Writer

February 6, 2007

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration's $142-billion war budget for next year leaves out money for the planned troop buildup in Iraq, a strong indication that the Pentagon views the increase as a short-term tactic to stem the escalating violence in Baghdad.

But Defense officials could not provide assurances Monday that the troop level would fall back again by next year, and acknowledged they may be forced to return to Congress for more money to pay for the extra forces if sectarian conflict continues to rage.

In unveiling the Defense Department's budget request, Tina Jonas, the Pentagon budget director, told reporters that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates provided instructions to treat the troop increase as "a near-term initiative" that would not need to be accounted for in the 2008 budget. But Jonas acknowledged those assumptions could change.

"I think we know that it will be wrong," Jonas said of the war-cost estimate.

"Obviously, things will change and we'll have to adjust at that point."

President Bush announced last month that he would send 21,500 additional U.S. troops to Iraq to help stem violence, a move that was widely criticized in Congress and met with disapproval by the American public.

The issue of how long the troop level will remain higher is highly sensitive within the Pentagon as well, with apparent disagreements over its size and duration occurring even between the outgoing and incoming commanders in Iraq.

$725 billion for defense

The $142-billion war budget submitted Monday was part of a complicated defense spending package that surpassed $725 billion. It also included $481 billion for non-war defense spending in 2008 and a $93-billion supplemental request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through the remainder of 2007.

Added to $70 billion approved last year for 2007 war spending, the extra $93 billion requested by Bush would bring this year's war spending total to $163 billion.

Congressional Democrats charged that, even without money for the additional troops, the war funding request is so high that it shows that the White House has no intention of reducing the U.S. presence in Iraq before next year's presidential election.

"The new funding requests for the war in Iraq submitted today give the American people no hope that President Bush has plans to reduce our military involvement in Iraq for the foreseeable future — in fact, just the opposite," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco).

The 2008 budget — which covers the fiscal year, October 2007 through September 2008 — includes projections that show war spending dropping to $50 billion in 2009.

Bush hastened to say that that projection did not foretell a reduction in the U.S. presence, and administration officials said the 2009 figure was seen as a "placeholder" to be adjusted in the future.

The Pentagon said Bush's decision to increase troops in Iraq would cost $5.6 billion through the end of 2007, a figure that officials said would cover the buildup for at least eight months. That was well below a Congressional Budget Office estimate issued last week that argued the cost could spiral to $27 billion for a yearlong buildup because of the number of support personnel needed to deploy an additional 21,500 combat troops.

Long-term plans

Even without the additional funding for the escalation in 2008, however, there were signs of the administration's commitment to a long-term presence in Iraq in their budget proposals, including hundreds of millions of dollars for military bases in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The 2007 portion of the budget includes a $318-million request for construction in Iraq, most of which will fund projects on two of the military's huge bases within the country: Al Asad Air Base in western Anbar province and Balad Air Base north of Baghdad.

It also asks for $650 million for military construction in Afghanistan, nearly half of it for projects at Bagram Air Base, the sprawling facility north of Kabul that serves as the military's prime operations center in the country.

In testimony shortly after becoming Defense secretary, Gates told the House Armed Services Committee that the U.S. did not want permanent bases in Iraq. But both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill remain skeptical. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) reintroduced legislation last month that would prevent the U.S. from establishing permanent bases in Iraq, a bill that has in the past garnered bipartisan support.

Despite the prospect of continued high troop levels in Iraq, the budget also assumes the Iraqi security forces will begin to take over more responsibilities by next year.

U.S. funding for the Iraqi security forces would rise 83% in 2007, to $5.5 billion, under the new proposals. But the funding would drop to $2 billion in 2008. By that time, according to budget documents, the Pentagon assumes the government of Iraq "will have taken on primary financial responsibility for sustaining the Iraqi security forces."

Afghan forces would get an even larger influx of funding in the proposed budget: $7.4 billion for the Afghan army and police, nearly triple last year's amount. However, funding for security forces is due to drop to $2.7 billion by 2008.

The Pentagon also for the first time detailed the cost of increasing the size of the Army and Marine Corps over the next five years, saying the additional 92,000 soldiers and Marines would add $117.6 billion through 2013. That includes $5.3 billion to be spent this year and an additional $18.6 billion for 2008.


Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times