The news story:
President Barack Obama fired a surprise broadside at the defense industry, saying he intends to clamp down on practices that have resulted in billions of dollars in cost overruns and delays in recent years.
At a time when Washington faces the prospect of bailing out multiple sectors of the economy, contractors’ cost overruns are showing up on the radar of many in the capital. And the Pentagon, which spends about $330 billion a year to buy everything from fighters to paper clips, is a particular focus of the new administration.
Mr. Obama has singled out the defense industry as one of the most wasteful. Last year, the Government Accountability Office found that 95 major Defense Department weapons contracts were over budget by a total of $295 billion — though some point out that the GAO’s figure includes legitimate changes to some contracts.
“In this time of great challenges, I recognize the real choice between investments that are designed to keep the American people safe and those that are designed to make a defense contractor rich,” the president said Wednesday.
Which is all well and good and any military veteran can tell you that waste in Defense is rather endemic – it is what happens when you’re spending other people’s money, which lesson liberals should take to heart as they go about spending trillions of dollars of other people’s money with Obamunism. Don’t fault the actual troops in the field – the problem usually comes in with defense contractors and those civilian and military Defense personnel who are looking for a cushy berth as well as pork-barreling politicians (like Jack Murtha (D-PA), to name a particularly nauseating sample of the species). As with all government agencies, a careful examination of Defense will discover a lot of money which is being wasted – and the more we attack such things, the better our military will be.
But as we go about looking for waste, fraud and abuse, we must not demonize the Defense industry, nor the military, nor cut vital programs just because they are large and expensive. The defense of the United States of America is the most important function the federal government has, and we must never find ourselves in a future war in the condition we were in 1941, when understrength military forces were using obsolete weapons to fight off powerful enemies – men died because short sighted politicians in the 1930’s stinted defense. We cannot engage in that level of criminal irresponsibility ever again.
It is a natural that a liberal, Democrat Administration will seek to cut defense – elections have consequences and one of them will be our military having to do more with less. The troops are up to it, but we must not betray them and send them into battle with anything less than the best we can provide at the time.
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