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The F-22 jet fighter costs $18,000 an hour to operate.
Wow it sure is expensive for the American Empire to kill brown skinned folks in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya!!! Pentagon officials they were not even planning for the spending reductions. Analysts expressed amazement that a department that plans for every contingency was not planning for this one. I suspect the reason the folks at the Pentagon are not planning for spending cuts is that that the military is a jobs program for these overpaid Generals and Admirals and they plan to use their connections to stop the cuts. Despite Threat of Cuts, Pentagon Officials Made No Contingency Plans By ELISABETH BUMILLER Published: November 22, 2011 WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta has painted such an apocalyptic vision of America’s national security under $500 billion in automatic defense budget cuts that Pentagon officials said Tuesday they were pushing back at Congress — and not even planning for the spending reductions, which are to take effect in January 2013. But independent military budget analysts described the cuts, which would bring the Pentagon base budget back to 2007 levels, as agonizing but manageable. The analysts, who have close ties to the Pentagon, expressed amazement that a department that plans for every contingency was not planning for this one. They laid out the possibility of cutbacks to most weapons programs, a further reduction in the size of the Army, large layoffs among the Defense Department’s 700,000 civilian employees and reduced military training time — such as on aircraft like the F-22 advanced jet fighter, which flies at Mach 2 and costs $18,000 an hour to operate, mostly because of the price of fuel. Other possibilities include cutting the number of aircraft carriers to 10 from 11 — the United States still has more than any other country — as well as increased fees for the military’s generous health care system, changes in military retirement, base closings around the country and delayed maintenance on ships and buildings. “I’m not suggesting these are smart things to do, necessarily,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a military policy and research group in Washington. “But if you had to do it, you could do it.” The $500 billion in cuts, triggered by the failure on Monday of a congressional panel to reach a deficit deal, are to spread out over a decade. They are to come on top of $450 billion in spending reductions over the next 10 years that the Defense Department and the White House agreed to last summer. Mr. Panetta, a former White House budget director, has described the $450 billion in cuts as painful but acceptable and is now determining where they should come from. In an interview this month, he said he was considering reducing medical and retirement benefits, shrinking the number of troops, reducing new weapons purchases and trimming the nuclear arsenal. But he has publicly opposed the $500 billion in additional cuts, which he described in a statement on Monday as tearing “a seam in the nation’s defense.” In a heated letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, Mr. Panetta declared that over a decade the cuts would lead to “the smallest ground force since 1940, the smallest number of ships since 1915 and the smallest Air Force in its history.” By Mr. Panetta’s calculations, the new cuts would reduce the 2013 budget by 23 percent — the reason Pentagon officials said they would push Congress to work out a way to avoid “sequestration,” the automatic cuts set in motion by the committee’s failure. (There appeared to be little support for such an agreement on Tuesday in Congress, however.) “We are not planning for the sequester,” said Doug Wilson, a Pentagon spokesman. “The focus is on trying to get Congress to do what it said it would do.” At the same time, Mr. Panetta’s calculation of a 23 percent reduction appears to be taking the worst case of the worst case. The defense secretary is using as his starting point $571 billion — the amount that the Pentagon had previously planned to submit to Congress for its 2013 base budget, before the agreement with the White House to cut $450 billion over a decade. Currently the Pentagon is planning on a 2013 budget of around $525 billion. Under the automatic cuts triggered by the committee’s failure, the 2013 Pentagon budget would have to shrink to $472 billion from $525 billion — an 11 percent reduction, or about the size of the Pentagon’s base budget in 2007. (The costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not included in the base budgets.) [How can a sane rational person NOT include the cost of wars in a military budget? Well I guess I made a mistake on that when I used the word "sane"] An 11 percent reduction is nonetheless a cut of $54 billion, which would have to be done in a single year — the real challenge in reducing Pentagon spending this way. “It’s the abruptness of the cuts, not the depth of the cuts, which makes it hard,” Mr. Harrison said. Although closing bases, shrinking the size of the Army and laying off civilians reduces spending over time, he said, the fastest way to reduce the budget is to make cuts in major weapons systems — which in fact began under Mr. Panetta’s predecessor, Robert M. Gates. Right now, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the most expensive weapons program in history, is the top target for cuts. (The Pentagon plans to spend nearly $400 billion buying 2,500 of the stealth jets through 2035. [That is $1,333 for every main woman, and child in the USA!]) Other potential targets include the Army’s planned ground combat vehicle and a “next-generation” long-range bomber under development by the Air Force. As a result, the military industry is already in full alarm. “The Pentagon has been cutting weapons programs by hundreds of billions of dollars for three years now,” said Loren B. Thompson, a consultant to military contractors. “There’s not much left to kill that won’t affect the military’s safety or success.” Other analysts argued that the United States had such overwhelming military superiority globally that it could easily withstand the cuts, even to the point of eliminating the Joint Strike Fighter. “We have airplanes coming out of our ears,” said Gordon Adams, who oversaw military budgets in the Clinton White House. “We’re in a technological race with ourselves.” Nonetheless, he said, the automatic cuts make life difficult for Pentagon budget planners and are “a terrible way to manage defense.” Some military budget analysts said they took Pentagon officials at their word that they were not in fact planning for the automatic spending reductions, for fear that the cuts would leak to reporters — and show that the Pentagon had found a way, however painful, to make them happen. |