THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW – February 4, 2010

Obama’s Budget Calls for Billions in New Spending for Drones
by: Jason Leopold
truthout|Report

This is how major US defense contractors reacted to the
unveiling of President Barack Obama’s fiscal year 2011
spending plan for the Pentagon, part of the president’s
overall $3.8 trillion budget proposal.

Shares of General Dynamics, a maker of military aircraft,
submarines and munitions, rose 3.9 percent and closed at
$69.43 in trading on the New York Stock Exchange, the
uptick due in large part to additional spending on the
war in Afghanistan, according to Sanford Bernstein, a
financial research firm.

Northrop Grumman Corp., which builds unmanned spy planes
and ships, rose 2.3 percent to close at $57.92. Boeing
Co., a manufacturer of aircraft carriers, shares increased
by 1.8 and closed at $61.70. Lockheed Martin’s shares rose
37 cents to close at $74.89. Raytheon Co., a missile
supplier, was up by a percentage point to close at $52.96,
while shares of L-3 Communications Holdings, a firm that
supplies intelligence gathering and monitoring equipment,
was up 1.6 percent to close at $84.64. And shares of
Harris Corp soared 4.2 percent to close at $44.74. Harris
manufactures tactical radios utilizes encryption technology.

All in all, it was a good day for the military-industrial
complex.

Indeed, Craig Fraser, an aerospace and defense analyst
with debt ratings firm Fitch Ratings, said the Defense
Department’s record $708 billion base budget, up $18.2
billion or 3.4 percent, was “better than we expected,
across the board.” The spending covers the fiscal year
which begins October 1, and runs through September 30,
2011. Adjusted for inflation, the defense budget is the
largest since World War II.

The budget was released along with the Pentagon’s
Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), which for the first time
in years has done away with the concept that the US must
be prepared to wage two wars at once. The QDR says the US
must be prepared for broader security challenges, which
includes investing in technologies to battle threats from
al-Qaeda.

About $159 billion will be used to continue funding the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan identified in the budget as
“overseas contingency operations.” The wars have already
topped $1 trillion.

Separately, the Obama administration also asked Congress
to immediately approve a $33 billion emergency supplemental
it included with the budget, which comes on top of $130
billion lawmakers approved late last year, to immediately
pay for the troop surge in Afghanistan. The $33 billion
is not included in the Pentagon’s $708 billion spending
package. So that means the Pentagon’s actual spending
proposal comes to $741 billion.

On the campaign trail, Obama vowed not to finance the war
using emergency supplmental requests. Rather, he said he
would pay for the wars out of the Pentagon’s overall
budget. But this is the second time Obama has asked
Congress to approve emergency funds for the wars. The
Bush administration financed the Iraq and Afghanistan
wars with emergency funding requests that were swiftly
approved by Congress.

Travis Sharp, a defense budget analyst at the Center
for American Security, said the Pentagon’s base budget
represents a 40 percent increase since 2001 and when the
costs of the wars are factored in overall defense spending
has increased by 70 percent.

Sharp said the base spending plan for 2011 is 3.5 percent
of gross domestic product. Adding in war costs, it comes
out to 4.6 percent of GDP. Obama has called for a three-
year spending freeze on domestic programs, but the Defense
Department exempt from the proposal.

Aside from the size of the defense budget, another
controversial aspect of it is what it will fund. More
than $2 billion will be used to purchase unmanned aerial
vehicles, or drones, which the Obama administration has
used increasingly over the past year to target suspected
terrorist hideouts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The drones,
which the administration wants to double in production,
have been blamed for a significant rise in civilian
casualties.

“The Budget … bolsters Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,
helicopters, and cyber capabilities and electronic warfare,
which are key components in the ongoing task of rebalancing
the military to focus on current and emerging threats,”
according to a copy of the Defense Department budget.

For the first time, according to The Los Angeles Times,
the Air Force is proposing the purchase of more drones
than combat aircraft and will double the production of
the MQ-9 Reaper, “a bigger, more heavily armed version
of the Predator drone, to 48. The Army will also buy 26
extended-range Predators.”

“The expansion will allow the military to increase unmanned
patrols – the number of planes in the air at once – to 65,
up from its current limit of 37,” The Los Angeles Times
noted.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters Monday that
the use of drones will continue to increase “even as the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan eventually wind down.”

“The more we have used them, the more we have identified
their potential in a broader and broader set of
circumstances,” Gates said.

Spending on the Predator and Reaper drones will jump from
$877.5 million in 2010 to $1.4 billion next year.

The budget also says “a major goal of the administration
is to provide the troops with the most effective and
modern equipment possible.”

“To accomplish this, the 2011 Budget continues to develop
and procure many advanced weapons systems that support
both today’s wars and future conflicts,” according to the
budget. “These include: the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a
new family of ground vehicles, new ships such as the next
generation ballistic missile submarine, and the P-8
aircraft.”

In a speech at West Point last year announcing his revised
strategy for the Afghanistan, Obama said, “we can’t simply
afford to ignore the price of these wars.”

But that’s exactly what it appears the Obama administration
has done. Spending on the wars for the next two years is
projected to hover around $159 billion, which is only
slightly less than what the Bush administration spent
during its last years in office. The proposed spending for
2011 is three times more than what Obama projected it to
be a year ago and the soaring costs of juggling two wars
has a major impact on new deficit numbers.

While Obama said in his State of the Union address last
week that creating new jobs for Americans is now his
“number one priority for 2010,” the massive defense
spending his budget proposes will actually do the opposite,
according to Dean Baker, co-director for the Center for
Economic and Policy Research.

In a report published on Truthout last November, Baker
said, “defense spending means that the government is
pulling away resources from the uses determined by the
market and instead using them to buy weapons and supplies
and to pay for soldiers and other military personnel. In
standard economic models, defense spending is a direct
drain on the economy, reducing efficiency, slowing growth
and costing jobs.”

“For some reason, no one has chosen to highlight the job
loss associated with higher defense spending,” Baker
wrote at the time. “In fact, the job loss attributable to
defense spending has probably never been mentioned in a
single news story in The New York Times, Washington Post,
National Public Radio, or any other major media outlet.
It is difficult to find a good explanation for this
omission.”

Baker would be just as disappointed reading the latest
round of news reports on defense spending. It appears
that the same void exists within mainstream media circles
related to how the Pentagon’s budget increase will impact
job growth.

————————————————————
Follow Your Favorite GopherCentral Publications on Twitter:
http://www.gophertweets.com/ More Coming Soon!
————————————————————

End of PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
Copyright 2010 by NextEra Media. All rights reserved.