Badpuppy Gay Today

Friday, 23 May 1997

Lawrence J. Korb, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration, has stated that the Pentagon's voracious appetite for the biggest slice of citizens' taxes is an easily traceable semi-secret, though one that is seldom given focus in the media.

The Pentagon does not want citizens to either ASK about how much tax moneys it devours annually, and, should these citizens actually know how much it devours, it doesn't want them to TELL anybody.

The former Pentagon official ridicules those public strategies that are used annually by the Department of Defense to assure that it remains the Number One tax-revenue-receiver, in figures tha have long climbed in ranges of $300 billion a year. Korb charges that recent deals between President Clinton and the Republican Congress call for spending nearly 1.4 trillion between 1998 and 2002, about $17 billion more than the Republicans proposed last year.

"Already," says Korb, "the United States spends more than all of its prospective enemies combined." In spite of this, laments the former defense chieftain, the Pentagon is still demanding more money--at least $10 billion a year "to meet its goal of $60 billion a year just for new weapons."

An unexplained factor, says Korb, is why the Department of Defense currently asks a 50 percent increase in spending on research, development and procurement of weapons.

"We already spend 40 percent more in these areas than all of our allies combined, 75 percent more than either Russia or China do and 90 percent more than Iraq and North Korea together."

Strangely, Korbs' analysis of outrageous military-budget requests is not the first of such complaints. Military spending has been a recurring but easily squelched factual rumor ever since President Dwight Eisenhower, in his last speech as the U.S. President, warned against the growing power of the "military-industrial complex." Fred J. Cook, a maverick reporter, wrote The Warfare State, warning of Pentagon shenanigans in the early 1960's.

Eisenhower, as Commander of U.S. Forces in Europe during World War II, had noted peculiarly aggressive tendencies growing in a U.S. industry that hoped to link its fortunes and profits to the Defense establishment, a link requiring unnecessary but periodic military scares. Currently, some believe, China is becoming the Pentagon's paper tiger of choice. Deliberate attempts to frighten the populace lead to unquestioned and exorbitant fleecing of those same citizens by crafty Pentagon procurers.

The Former Assistant Defense Secretary does not believe, as planners in the Bush administration claimed, that the U.S. must spend so that it is able to fight two large scale wars as once. To fight one large scale war is enough, he says, if we also plan for smaller peace missions elsewhere. Korb believes that the United States should be able to maintain its obligations to protect its citizens with a budget that saves $100 billion between now and the year 2002.