Congress Should Demand Wiser, Not More, War Spending
A U.S. Army UH-60 Black Hawk medevac helicopter conducts a limited visibility, or brownout, landing during medevac training in northern Iraq on July 3, 2016.
By William D. Hartung Read bio
July 18, 2016
U.S. Army / Maj. Allen Hill
There’s too much slush in the supplemental, as shown by the fourfold jump in spending per deployed servicemember.
The heads of the armed services committees in the House and the Senate have called on President Obama to submit a supplemental budget request to cover the costs of deploying 560 additional troops to Iraq. The chairs, Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., have also pointed to the president’s decision to slow down the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan as a reason to increase war spending.
If every dollar in the current war budget were being spent as intended, Thornberry and McCain might have a point. But this is manifestly not the case. Over the past decade, the president and the Congress have spent tens of billions of dollars from the war fund – officially known as the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account – on equipment and activities that have nothing to do with fighting wars. OCO has become a slush fund to pay for projects that don’t fit under the caps on the Pentagon’s base budget that are part of current law. If OCO were used properly, there would be plenty of funding available to pay for the president’s shifts in troop deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2016/07/congress-should-demand-wiser-not-more-war-spending/129968/?oref=d-dontmiss
