$200 BILLION AT THE PENTAGON - A RECIPE FOR WASTING AND PROLONGING THE WAR - Filenews 23/3
By William Hartung
Watching the Trump administration's Pentagon spending proposals is like watching a freight train with faulty brakes running at breakneck speed.
The US president announced this year his intention to increase the Pentagon's annual budget by $500 billion. The additional amount alone is greater than the total military budget of any other country. The Pentagon's budget would increase to a post-World War II record amount of $1.5 trillion. Such an increase cannot be justified. There aren't even enough factories or skilled labour to absorb such a large increase in a year. The proposal is a "recipe for waste and deception" at a time when these funds can be used in much better ways.
Last week, the Pentagon announced that it needed an additional $200 billion. dollars to finance the war against Iran and the expansion of the defense industry's production capacity to produce bombs and missiles at a faster rate. Congress must reject this new request.
Pentagon sources told Congress that the first week of the war against Iran cost $11.3 billion. The cost of the war against Iran so far is 3 billion dollars higher than the proposed annual budgets of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency combined, both of which are set to suffer drastic cuts under the Trump administration's proposed 2026 budget. Obviously, we can afford an indefinite, unnecessary war, but we can't afford to invest in preventing new pandemics or limiting the ravages of climate change – or at least that's what current federal priorities suggest.
The war against Iran has not yet been clearly explained or justified. It was initially justified by the false claim that Iran could soon attack the US, perhaps even with a nuclear weapon. But Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, and if it did, it would take years to mount it on a missile and develop a missile with a range of 6,000 miles that could reach the United States. A 2025 estimate by the Defense Intelligence Agency indicated that Iran may have developed a missile of this range by 2035.
None of the other reasons put forward by the Trump administration to attack Iran and trigger a war across the Middle East is convincing. This is an unnecessary war that destabilizes the Middle East and disrupts the global economy, with no clear security benefits.
The Pentagon doesn't need more spending. More fiscal discipline is needed — no more unnecessary wars, no pointless waste of money on dysfunctional weapons systems, and no exorbitant prices for basic items like spare parts. More money for the Pentagon right now would simply mean more waste of taxpayer money and a longer-lasting war in the Middle East. We cannot allow this to happen.
