Links
Pentagon budget largest ever
Despite calls on Capitol Hill for major defense budget cuts, the Pentagon next week will unveil the largest budget in its history–driven by an expanding list of what defines national security.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said his proposed $553 billion budget "represents, in my view, the minimum level of defense spending that is necessary, given the complex and unpredictable array of security challenges the United States faces around the globe."
Those challenges now include pandemic diseases, piracy, human trafficking, rising oceans, national debt, education, cyber warfare, the wars on terrorism and traditional state-to-state threats.
But defense analysts, budget experts and some members of Congress take a more jaundiced view, saying the insistence that the U.S. fund a military poised to address every type of possible threat not only thwarts efforts to control the deficit, but also makes it difficult to set priorities on what threats the nation really faces.