Tomgram: William Hartung, How to Disappear Money, Pentagon-Style
By William Hartung
Posted on May 24, 2016, Printed on May 28, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176144/ ;
Colonel Mark Cheadle, a spokesman for U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM),
recently made a startling disclosure to Voice of America (VOA). AFRICOM, he
said, is currently mulling over 11 possible locations for its second base on
the continent. If, however, there was a frontrunner among them Cheadle
wasn't about to disclose it. All he would say was that Nigeria isn't one of
the countries in contention.
Writing for VOA, Carla Babb filled in the rest of the picture in terms of
U.S. military activities in Africa. "The United States currently has one
military base in the east African nation of Djibouti," she observed. "U.S.
forces are also on the ground in Somalia to assist the regional fight
against al-Shabab and in Cameroon to help with the multinational effort
against Nigeria-based Boko Haram."
A day later, Babb's story disappeared. Instead, there was a new article in
which she noted that "Cheadle had initially said the U.S. was looking at 11
locations for a second base, but later told VOA he misunderstood the
question." Babb reiterated that the U.S. had only the lone military base in
Djibouti and stated that "[o]ne of the possible new cooperative security
locations is in Cameroon, but Cheadle did not identify other locations due
to 'host nation sensitivities.'"
U.S. troops have, indeed, been based at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti since
2002. In that time, the base has grown from 88 acres to about 600 acres and
has seen more than $600 million in construction and upgrades already awarded
or allocated. It's also true that U.S. troops, as Babb notes, are operating
in Somalia -- from at least two bases -- and the U.S. has indeed set up a
base in Cameroon. As such, the "second" U.S. base in Africa, wherever it's
eventually located, will actually be more like the fifth U.S. base on the
continent. That is, of course, if you don't count Chabelley Airfield, a
hush-hush drone base the U.S. operates elsewhere in Djibouti, or the U.S.
staging areas, cooperative security locations, forward operating locations,
and other outposts in Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad,
Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Senegal, the Seychelles,
Somalia, South Sudan, and Uganda, among other locales. When I counted late
last year, in fact, I came up with 60 such sites in 34 countries. And just
recently, Missy Ryan of the Washington Post added to that number when she
disclosed that "American Special Operations troops have been stationed at
two outposts in eastern and western Libya since late 2015."
To be fair, the U.S. doesn't call any of these bases "bases" -- except when
officials forget to keep up the fiction. For example, the National Defense
Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016 included a $50 million request for
the construction of an "airfield and base camp at Agadez, Niger." But give
Cheadle credit for pushing a fiction that persists despite ample evidence to
the contrary.
It isn't hard, of course, to understand why U.S. Africa Command has set up a
sprawling network of off-the-books bases or why it peddles misinformation
about its gigantic "small" footprint in Africa. It's undoubtedly for the
same reason that they stonewall me on even basic information about their
operations. The Department of Defense, from tooth to tail, likes to operate
in the dark.
Today, TomDispatch regular Bill Hartung reveals another kind of Pentagon
effort to obscure and obfuscate involving another kind of highly creative
accounting: think slush funds, secret programs, dodgy bookkeeping, and the
type of financial malfeasance that could only be carried out by an
institution that is, by its very nature, too big to fail (inside the Beltway
if not on the battlefield).
Rejecting both accurate accounting and actual accountability -- from the
halls of the Pentagon to austere camps in Africa -- the Defense Department
has demonstrated a longstanding commitment to keeping Americans in the dark
about the activities being carried out with their dollars and in their name.
Luckily, Hartung is willing to shine a bright light on the Pentagon's shady
practices. Nick Turse
The Pentagon's War on Accountability
Slush Funds, Smoke and Mirrors, and Funny Money Equal Weapons Systems Galore
By William D. Hartung
Now you see it, now you don't. Think of it as the Department of Defense's
version of the street con game, three-card monte, or maybe simply as the
Pentagon shuffle. In any case, the Pentagon's budget is as close to a work
of art as you're likely to find in the U.S. government -- if, that is, by
work of art you mean scam.
The United States is on track to spend more than $600 billion on the
military this year -- more, that is, than was spent at the height of
President Ronald Reagan's Cold War military buildup, and more than the
military budgets of at least the next seven nations in the world combined.
And keep in mind that that's just a partial total. As an analysis by the
Straus Military Reform Project has shown, if we count related activities
like homeland security, veterans' affairs, nuclear warhead production at the
Department of Energy, military aid to other countries, and interest on the
military-related national debt, that figure reaches a cool $1 trillion.
The more that's spent on "defense," however, the less the Pentagon wants us
to know about how those mountains of money are actually being used. As the
only major federal agency that can't pass an audit, the Department of
Defense (DoD) is the poster child for irresponsible budgeting.
It's not just that its books don't add up, however. The DoD is taking
active measures to disguise how it is spending the hundreds of billions of
taxpayer dollars it receives every year -- from using the separate "war
budget" as a slush fund to pay for pet projects that have nothing to do with
fighting wars to keeping the cost of its new nuclear bomber a secret. Add
in dozens of other secret projects hidden in the department's budget and the
Pentagon's poorly documented military aid programs, and it's clear that the
DoD believes it has something to hide.
Don't for a moment imagine that the Pentagon's growing list of secret
programs and evasive budgetary maneuvers is accidental or simply a matter of
sloppy bookkeeping. Much of it is remarkably purposeful. By keeping us in
the dark about how it spends our money, the Pentagon has made it virtually
impossible for anyone to hold it accountable for just about anything. An
entrenched bureaucracy is determined not to provide information that might
be used to bring its sprawling budget -- and so the institution itself --
under control. That's why budgetary deception has become such a standard
operating procedure at the Department of Defense.
The audit problem is a case in point. The Pentagon along with all other
major federal agencies was first required to make its books auditable in the
Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990. More than 25 years later, there is no
evidence to suggest that the Pentagon will ever be able to pass an audit.
In fact, the one limited instance in which success seemed to be within reach
-- an audit of a portion of the books of a single service, the Marine Corps
-- turned out, upon closer inspection, to be a case study in bureaucratic
resistance.
In April 2014, when it appeared that the Corps had come back with a clean
audit, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was so elated that he held a special
ceremony in the "Hall of Heroes" at the Pentagon. "It might seem a bit
unusual to be in the Hall of Heroes to honor a bookkeeping accomplishment,"
he acknowledged, "but damn, this is an accomplishment."
In March 2015, however, that "accomplishment" vanished into thin air. The
Pentagon's Office of Inspector General (OIG), which had overseen the work of
Grant Thornton, the private firm that conducted the audit, denied that it
had been successful (allegedly in response to "new information"). In fact,
in late 2013, as Reuters reported, auditors at the OIG had argued for months
against green-lighting Grant Thornton's work, believing that it was full of
obvious holes. They were, however, overruled by the deputy inspector
general for auditing, who had what Reuters described as a "longstanding
professional relationship" with the Grant Thornton executive supervising the
audit.
The Pentagon and the firm deny that there was any conflict of interest, but
the bottom line is clear enough: there was far more interest in promoting
the idea that the Marine Corps could pass an audit than in seeing it
actually do so, even if inconvenient facts had to be swept under the rug.
This sort of behavior is hardly surprising once you consider all the
benefits from an undisturbed status quo that accrue to Pentagon bureaucrats
and cash-hungry contractors.
Without a reliable paper trail, there is no systematic way to track waste,
fraud, and abuse in Pentagon contracting, or even to figure out how many
contractors the Pentagon employs, though a conservative estimate puts the
number at well over 600,000. The result is easy money with minimal
accountability.
How to Arm the Planet
In recent years, keeping tabs on how the Pentagon spends its money has grown
even more difficult thanks to the "war budget" -- known in Pentagonese as
the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account -- which has become a
nearly bottomless pit for items that have nothing to do with fighting wars.
The use of the OCO as a slush fund began in earnest in the early years of
the Bush administration's war in Iraq and has continued ever since. It's
hard to put a precise number on how much money has been slipped into that
budget or taken out of it to pay for pet projects of every sort in the last
decade-plus, but the total is certainly more than $100 billion and counting.
The Pentagon's routine use of the war budget as a way to fund whatever it
wants has set an example for a Congress that's seldom seen a military
project it wasn't eager to pay for. Only recently, for instance, the House
Armed Services Committee chair, Texas Republican Congressman Mac Thornberry,
proposed taking $18 billion from the war budget to cover items like an extra
11 F-35 combat aircraft and 14 F-18 fighter-bombers that the Pentagon hadn't
even asked for.
This was great news for Lockheed Martin, which needs a shot in the arm for
its troubled F-35 program, already slated to be the most expensive weapons
system in history, and for Boeing, which has been lobbying aggressively to
keep its F-18 production line open in the face of declining orders from the
Navy. But it's bad news for the troops because, as the Project on
Government Oversight has demonstrated, the money used to pay for the
unneeded planes will come at the expense of training and maintenance funds.
This is, by the way, the height of hypocrisy at a time when the House Armed
Services Committee is routinely sending out hysterical missives about the
country's supposed lack of military readiness. The money to adequately
train military personnel and keep their equipment running is, in fact,
there. Members of Congress like Thornberry would just have to stop raiding
the operations budget to pay for big ticket weapons systems, while turning a
blind eye to wasteful spending in other parts of the Pentagon budget.
Thornberry's gambit may not carry the day, since both President Obama and
Senate Armed Services Committee chair John McCain oppose it. But as long as
a separate war budget exists, the temptation to stuff it with unnecessary
programs will persist as well.
Of course, that war budget is just part of the problem. The Pentagon has so
many budding programs tucked away in so many different lines of its budget
that even its officials have a hard time keeping track of what's actually
going on. As for the rest of us, we're essentially in the dark.
Consider, for instance, the proliferation of military aid programs. The
Security Assistance Monitor, a nonprofit that tracks such programs, has
identified more than two dozen of them worth about $10 billion annually.
Combine them with similar programs tucked away in the State Department's
budget, and the U.S. is contributing to the arming and training of security
forces in 180 countries. (To put that mind-boggling total in perspective,
there are at most 196 countries on the planet.) Who could possibly keep
track of such programs, no less what effect they may be having on the
countries and militaries involved, or on the complex politics of, and
conflicts in, various regions?
Best suggestion: don't even think about it (which is exactly what the
Pentagon and the military-industrial complex want you to do). And no need
for Congress to do so either. After all, as Lora Lumpe and Jeremy Ravinsky
of the Open Society Foundations noted earlier this year, the Pentagon is the
only government agency providing foreign assistance that does not even have
to submit to Congress an annual budget justification for what it does. As a
result, they write, "the public does not know how much the DoD is spending
in a given country and why."
Slush Funds Galore
If smokescreens and evasive maneuvers aren't enough to hide the Pentagon's
actual priorities from the taxpaying public, there's always secrecy. The
Secrecy Project at the Federation of American Scientists recently put the
size of the intelligence portion of the national security state's "black
budget" -- its secret spending on everything from spying to developing
high-tech weaponry -- at more than $70 billion. That figure includes a wide
variety of activities carried out through the CIA, the NSA, and other
members of the intelligence community, but $16.8 billion of it was requested
directly by the Department of Defense. And that $70 billion is just the tip
of the iceberg when it comes to secret spending programs, since billions
more in secret financing for the development and acquisition of new weapons
systems has been squirreled away elsewhere.
The largest recent project to have its total costs shrouded in secrecy is
the B-21, the Air Force's new nuclear bomber. Air Force officials claim that
they need to keep the cost secret lest potential enemies "connect the dots"
and learn too much about the plane's key characteristics. In a letter to
Senator McCain, an advocate of making the cost of the plane public, Ronald
Walden of the Air Force's Rapid Capabilities Office claimed that there was
"a strong correlation between the cost of an air vehicle and its total
weight." This, he suggested, might make it "decisively easier" for potential
opponents to guess its range and payload.
If such assessments sound ludicrous, it's because they are. As the
histories of other major Pentagon acquisition programs have shown, the price
of a system tells you just that -- its price -- and nothing more.
Otherwise, with its classic cost overruns, the F-35 would have a range
beyond compare, possibly to Mars and back. Of course, the real rationale for
keeping the full cost estimate for the B-21 secret is to avoid bad
publicity. Budget analyst Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies suggests that it's an attempt to avoid "sticker shock"
for a program that he estimates could cost more than $100 billion to develop
and purchase.
The bomber, in turn, is just part of a planned $1 trillion splurge over the
next three decades on a new generation of bombers, ballistic missile
submarines, and ground-based nuclear missiles, part of an updating of the
vast U.S. nuclear arsenal. And keep this in mind: that trillion dollars is
simply an initial estimate before the usual Pentagon cost overruns even
begin to come into play. Financially, the nuclear plan is going to hit
taxpayer wallets particularly hard in the mid-2020s when a number of wildly
expensive non-nuclear systems like the F-35 combat aircraft will also be
hitting peak production.
Under the circumstances, it doesn't take a genius to know that there's only
one way to avoid the budgetary equivalent of a 30-car pile up: increase the
Pentagon's already ample finances yet again. Principal Deputy
Undersecretary of Defense Brian McKeon was referring to the costs of
building new nuclear delivery vehicles when he said that the administration
was "wondering how the heck we're going to pay for it, and probably thanking
our lucky stars we won't be here to answer the question." Of course, the
rest of us will be stuck holding the bag when all those programs cloaked in
secrecy suddenly come out of hiding and the bills come fully due.
At this point, you may not be shocked to learn that, in response to McKeon's
uncomfortable question, the Pentagon has come up with yet another budgetary
gimmick. It's known as the "National Sea-Based Deterrence Fund," or as
Taxpayers for Common Sense more accurately labels it, "the Navy's submarine
slush fund." The idea -- a longstanding darling of the submarine lobby (and
yes, Virginia, there is a submarine lobby in Washington) -- is to set up a
separate slush fund outside the Navy's normal shipbuilding budget. That's
where the money for the new ballistic missile submarine program, currently
slated to cost $139 billion for 12 subs, would go.
Establishing such a new slush fund would, in turn, finesse any direct
budgetary competition between the submarine program and the new surface
ships the Navy also wants, and so avoid a political battle that might end up
substantially reducing the number of vessels the Navy is hoping to buy over
the next 30 years. Naturally, the money for the submarine fund will have to
come from somewhere, either one of the other military services or that
operations and maintenance budget so regularly raided to help pay for
expensive weapons programs.
Not to be outmaneuvered, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James has now asked
Congress to set up a "strategic deterrence fund" to pay for its two newest
nuclear delivery vehicles, the planned bomber and a long-range nuclear-armed
ballistic missile. In theory, this would take pressure off other major Air
Force projects like the F-35, but as with the submarine fund, it only adds
up if a future president and a future Congress can be persuaded to jack up
the Pentagon budget to make room for these and other weapons systems.
In the end, however the specifics work out, any "fund" for such weaponry
will be just another case of smoke and mirrors, a way of kicking the nuclear
funding crisis down the road in hopes of fatter budgets to come. Why make
choices now when the Pentagon and the military services can bet on
blackmailing a future Trump or Clinton administration and a future Congress
into ponying up the extra billions of dollars needed to make their latest
ill-conceived plans add up?
If your head is spinning after this brief tour of the Pentagon's budget
labyrinth, it should be. That's just what the Pentagon wants its painfully
complicated budget practices to do: leave Congress, any administration, and
the public too confused and exhausted to actually hold it accountable for
how our tax dollars are being spent. So far, they're getting away with it.
William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Arms and
Security Project at the Center for International Policy and a senior adviser
to the Security Assistance Monitor. He is the author of, among other books,
Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial
Complex.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 William D. Hartung
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176144
Tomgram: William Hartung, How to Disappear Money, Pentagon-Style
By William Hartung
Posted on May 24, 2016, Printed on May 28, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176144/ ;
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Colonel Mark Cheadle, a spokesman for U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM),
recently made a startling disclosure to Voice of America (VOA). AFRICOM, he
said, is currently mulling over 11 possible locations for its second base on
the continent. If, however, there was a frontrunner among them Cheadle
wasn't about to disclose it. All he would say was that Nigeria isn't one of
the countries in contention.
Writing for VOA, Carla Babb filled in the rest of the picture in terms of
U.S. military activities in Africa. "The United States currently has one
military base in the east African nation of Djibouti," she observed. "U.S.
forces are also on the ground in Somalia to assist the regional fight
against al-Shabab and in Cameroon to help with the multinational effort
against Nigeria-based Boko Haram."
A day later, Babb's story disappeared. Instead, there was a new article in
which she noted that "Cheadle had initially said the U.S. was looking at 11
locations for a second base, but later told VOA he misunderstood the
question." Babb reiterated that the U.S. had only the lone military base in
Djibouti and stated that "[o]ne of the possible new cooperative security
locations is in Cameroon, but Cheadle did not identify other locations due
to 'host nation sensitivities.'"
U.S. troops have, indeed, been based at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti since
2002. In that time, the base has grown from 88 acres to about 600 acres and
has seen more than $600 million in construction and upgrades already awarded
or allocated. It's also true that U.S. troops, as Babb notes, are operating
in Somalia -- from at least two bases -- and the U.S. has indeed set up a
base in Cameroon. As such, the "second" U.S. base in Africa, wherever it's
eventually located, will actually be more like the fifth U.S. base on the
continent. That is, of course, if you don't count Chabelley Airfield, a
hush-hush drone base the U.S. operates elsewhere in Djibouti, or the U.S.
staging areas, cooperative security locations, forward operating locations,
and other outposts in Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad,
Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Senegal, the Seychelles,
Somalia, South Sudan, and Uganda, among other locales. When I counted late
last year, in fact, I came up with 60 such sites in 34 countries. And just
recently, Missy Ryan of the Washington Post added to that number when she
disclosed that "American Special Operations troops have been stationed at
two outposts in eastern and western Libya since late 2015."
To be fair, the U.S. doesn't call any of these bases "bases" -- except when
officials forget to keep up the fiction. For example, the National Defense
Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016 included a $50 million request for
the construction of an "airfield and base camp at Agadez, Niger." But give
Cheadle credit for pushing a fiction that persists despite ample evidence to
the contrary.
It isn't hard, of course, to understand why U.S. Africa Command has set up a
sprawling network of off-the-books bases or why it peddles misinformation
about its gigantic "small" footprint in Africa. It's undoubtedly for the
same reason that they stonewall me on even basic information about their
operations. The Department of Defense, from tooth to tail, likes to operate
in the dark.
Today, TomDispatch regular Bill Hartung reveals another kind of Pentagon
effort to obscure and obfuscate involving another kind of highly creative
accounting: think slush funds, secret programs, dodgy bookkeeping, and the
type of financial malfeasance that could only be carried out by an
institution that is, by its very nature, too big to fail (inside the Beltway
if not on the battlefield).
Rejecting both accurate accounting and actual accountability -- from the
halls of the Pentagon to austere camps in Africa -- the Defense Department
has demonstrated a longstanding commitment to keeping Americans in the dark
about the activities being carried out with their dollars and in their name.
Luckily, Hartung is willing to shine a bright light on the Pentagon's shady
practices. Nick Turse
The Pentagon's War on Accountability
Slush Funds, Smoke and Mirrors, and Funny Money Equal Weapons Systems Galore
By William D. Hartung
Now you see it, now you don't. Think of it as the Department of Defense's
version of the street con game, three-card monte, or maybe simply as the
Pentagon shuffle. In any case, the Pentagon's budget is as close to a work
of art as you're likely to find in the U.S. government -- if, that is, by
work of art you mean scam.
The United States is on track to spend more than $600 billion on the
military this year -- more, that is, than was spent at the height of
President Ronald Reagan's Cold War military buildup, and more than the
military budgets of at least the next seven nations in the world combined.
And keep in mind that that's just a partial total. As an analysis by the
Straus Military Reform Project has shown, if we count related activities
like homeland security, veterans' affairs, nuclear warhead production at the
Department of Energy, military aid to other countries, and interest on the
military-related national debt, that figure reaches a cool $1 trillion.
The more that's spent on "defense," however, the less the Pentagon wants us
to know about how those mountains of money are actually being used. As the
only major federal agency that can't pass an audit, the Department of
Defense (DoD) is the poster child for irresponsible budgeting.
It's not just that its books don't add up, however. The DoD is taking active
measures to disguise how it is spending the hundreds of billions of taxpayer
dollars it receives every year -- from using the separate "war budget" as a
slush fund to pay for pet projects that have nothing to do with fighting
wars to keeping the cost of its new nuclear bomber a secret. Add in dozens
of other secret projects hidden in the department's budget and the
Pentagon's poorly documented military aid programs, and it's clear that the
DoD believes it has something to hide.
Don't for a moment imagine that the Pentagon's growing list of secret
programs and evasive budgetary maneuvers is accidental or simply a matter of
sloppy bookkeeping. Much of it is remarkably purposeful. By keeping us in
the dark about how it spends our money, the Pentagon has made it virtually
impossible for anyone to hold it accountable for just about anything. An
entrenched bureaucracy is determined not to provide information that might
be used to bring its sprawling budget -- and so the institution itself --
under control. That's why budgetary deception has become such a standard
operating procedure at the Department of Defense.
The audit problem is a case in point. The Pentagon along with all other
major federal agencies was first required to make its books auditable in the
Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990. More than 25 years later, there is no
evidence to suggest that the Pentagon will ever be able to pass an audit. In
fact, the one limited instance in which success seemed to be within reach --
an audit of a portion of the books of a single service, the Marine Corps --
turned out, upon closer inspection, to be a case study in bureaucratic
resistance.
In April 2014, when it appeared that the Corps had come back with a clean
audit, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was so elated that he held a special
ceremony in the "Hall of Heroes" at the Pentagon. "It might seem a bit
unusual to be in the Hall of Heroes to honor a bookkeeping accomplishment,"
he acknowledged, "but damn, this is an accomplishment."
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1568586973/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1568586973/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20In March
2015, however, that "accomplishment" vanished into thin air. The Pentagon's
Office of Inspector General (OIG), which had overseen the work of Grant
Thornton, the private firm that conducted the audit, denied that it had been
successful (allegedly in response to "new information"). In fact, in late
2013, as Reuters reported, auditors at the OIG had argued for months against
green-lighting Grant Thornton's work, believing that it was full of obvious
holes. They were, however, overruled by the deputy inspector general for
auditing, who had what Reuters described as a "longstanding professional
relationship" with the Grant Thornton executive supervising the audit.
The Pentagon and the firm deny that there was any conflict of interest, but
the bottom line is clear enough: there was far more interest in promoting
the idea that the Marine Corps could pass an audit than in seeing it
actually do so, even if inconvenient facts had to be swept under the rug.
This sort of behavior is hardly surprising once you consider all the
benefits from an undisturbed status quo that accrue to Pentagon bureaucrats
and cash-hungry contractors.
Without a reliable paper trail, there is no systematic way to track waste,
fraud, and abuse in Pentagon contracting, or even to figure out how many
contractors the Pentagon employs, though a conservative estimate puts the
number at well over 600,000. The result is easy money with minimal
accountability.
How to Arm the Planet
In recent years, keeping tabs on how the Pentagon spends its money has grown
even more difficult thanks to the "war budget" -- known in Pentagonese as
the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account -- which has become a
nearly bottomless pit for items that have nothing to do with fighting wars.
The use of the OCO as a slush fund began in earnest in the early years of
the Bush administration's war in Iraq and has continued ever since. It's
hard to put a precise number on how much money has been slipped into that
budget or taken out of it to pay for pet projects of every sort in the last
decade-plus, but the total is certainly more than $100 billion and counting.
The Pentagon's routine use of the war budget as a way to fund whatever it
wants has set an example for a Congress that's seldom seen a military
project it wasn't eager to pay for. Only recently, for instance, the House
Armed Services Committee chair, Texas Republican Congressman Mac Thornberry,
proposed taking $18 billion from the war budget to cover items like an extra
11 F-35 combat aircraft and 14 F-18 fighter-bombers that the Pentagon hadn't
even asked for.
This was great news for Lockheed Martin, which needs a shot in the arm for
its troubled F-35 program, already slated to be the most expensive weapons
system in history, and for Boeing, which has been lobbying aggressively to
keep its F-18 production line open in the face of declining orders from the
Navy. But it's bad news for the troops because, as the Project on Government
Oversight has demonstrated, the money used to pay for the unneeded planes
will come at the expense of training and maintenance funds.
This is, by the way, the height of hypocrisy at a time when the House Armed
Services Committee is routinely sending out hysterical missives about the
country's supposed lack of military readiness. The money to adequately train
military personnel and keep their equipment running is, in fact, there.
Members of Congress like Thornberry would just have to stop raiding the
operations budget to pay for big ticket weapons systems, while turning a
blind eye to wasteful spending in other parts of the Pentagon budget.
Thornberry's gambit may not carry the day, since both President Obama and
Senate Armed Services Committee chair John McCain oppose it. But as long as
a separate war budget exists, the temptation to stuff it with unnecessary
programs will persist as well.
Of course, that war budget is just part of the problem. The Pentagon has so
many budding programs tucked away in so many different lines of its budget
that even its officials have a hard time keeping track of what's actually
going on. As for the rest of us, we're essentially in the dark.
Consider, for instance, the proliferation of military aid programs. The
Security Assistance Monitor, a nonprofit that tracks such programs, has
identified more than two dozen of them worth about $10 billion annually.
Combine them with similar programs tucked away in the State Department's
budget, and the U.S. is contributing to the arming and training of security
forces in 180 countries. (To put that mind-boggling total in perspective,
there are at most 196 countries on the planet.) Who could possibly keep
track of such programs, no less what effect they may be having on the
countries and militaries involved, or on the complex politics of, and
conflicts in, various regions?
Best suggestion: don't even think about it (which is exactly what the
Pentagon and the military-industrial complex want you to do). And no need
for Congress to do so either. After all, as Lora Lumpe and Jeremy Ravinsky
of the Open Society Foundations noted earlier this year, the Pentagon is the
only government agency providing foreign assistance that does not even have
to submit to Congress an annual budget justification for what it does. As a
result, they write, "the public does not know how much the DoD is spending
in a given country and why."
Slush Funds Galore
If smokescreens and evasive maneuvers aren't enough to hide the Pentagon's
actual priorities from the taxpaying public, there's always secrecy. The
Secrecy Project at the Federation of American Scientists recently put the
size of the intelligence portion of the national security state's "black
budget" -- its secret spending on everything from spying to developing
high-tech weaponry -- at more than $70 billion. That figure includes a wide
variety of activities carried out through the CIA, the NSA, and other
members of the intelligence community, but $16.8 billion of it was requested
directly by the Department of Defense. And that $70 billion is just the tip
of the iceberg when it comes to secret spending programs, since billions
more in secret financing for the development and acquisition of new weapons
systems has been squirreled away elsewhere.
The largest recent project to have its total costs shrouded in secrecy is
the B-21, the Air Force's new nuclear bomber. Air Force officials claim that
they need to keep the cost secret lest potential enemies "connect the dots"
and learn too much about the plane's key characteristics. In a letter to
Senator McCain, an advocate of making the cost of the plane public, Ronald
Walden of the Air Force's Rapid Capabilities Office claimed that there was
"a strong correlation between the cost of an air vehicle and its total
weight." This, he suggested, might make it "decisively easier" for potential
opponents to guess its range and payload.
If such assessments sound ludicrous, it's because they are. As the histories
of other major Pentagon acquisition programs have shown, the price of a
system tells you just that -- its price -- and nothing more. Otherwise, with
its classic cost overruns, the F-35 would have a range beyond compare,
possibly to Mars and back. Of course, the real rationale for keeping the
full cost estimate for the B-21 secret is to avoid bad publicity. Budget
analyst Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies
suggests that it's an attempt to avoid "sticker shock" for a program that he
estimates could cost more than $100 billion to develop and purchase.
The bomber, in turn, is just part of a planned $1 trillion splurge over the
next three decades on a new generation of bombers, ballistic missile
submarines, and ground-based nuclear missiles, part of an updating of the
vast U.S. nuclear arsenal. And keep this in mind: that trillion dollars is
simply an initial estimate before the usual Pentagon cost overruns even
begin to come into play. Financially, the nuclear plan is going to hit
taxpayer wallets particularly hard in the mid-2020s when a number of wildly
expensive non-nuclear systems like the F-35 combat aircraft will also be
hitting peak production.
Under the circumstances, it doesn't take a genius to know that there's only
one way to avoid the budgetary equivalent of a 30-car pile up: increase the
Pentagon's already ample finances yet again. Principal Deputy Undersecretary
of Defense Brian McKeon was referring to the costs of building new nuclear
delivery vehicles when he said that the administration was "wondering how
the heck we're going to pay for it, and probably thanking our lucky stars we
won't be here to answer the question." Of course, the rest of us will be
stuck holding the bag when all those programs cloaked in secrecy suddenly
come out of hiding and the bills come fully due.
At this point, you may not be shocked to learn that, in response to McKeon's
uncomfortable question, the Pentagon has come up with yet another budgetary
gimmick. It's known as the "National Sea-Based Deterrence Fund," or as
Taxpayers for Common Sense more accurately labels it, "the Navy's submarine
slush fund." The idea -- a longstanding darling of the submarine lobby (and
yes, Virginia, there is a submarine lobby in Washington) -- is to set up a
separate slush fund outside the Navy's normal shipbuilding budget. That's
where the money for the new ballistic missile submarine program, currently
slated to cost $139 billion for 12 subs, would go.
Establishing such a new slush fund would, in turn, finesse any direct
budgetary competition between the submarine program and the new surface
ships the Navy also wants, and so avoid a political battle that might end up
substantially reducing the number of vessels the Navy is hoping to buy over
the next 30 years. Naturally, the money for the submarine fund will have to
come from somewhere, either one of the other military services or that
operations and maintenance budget so regularly raided to help pay for
expensive weapons programs.
Not to be outmaneuvered, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James has now asked
Congress to set up a "strategic deterrence fund" to pay for its two newest
nuclear delivery vehicles, the planned bomber and a long-range nuclear-armed
ballistic missile. In theory, this would take pressure off other major Air
Force projects like the F-35, but as with the submarine fund, it only adds
up if a future president and a future Congress can be persuaded to jack up
the Pentagon budget to make room for these and other weapons systems.
In the end, however the specifics work out, any "fund" for such weaponry
will be just another case of smoke and mirrors, a way of kicking the nuclear
funding crisis down the road in hopes of fatter budgets to come. Why make
choices now when the Pentagon and the military services can bet on
blackmailing a future Trump or Clinton administration and a future Congress
into ponying up the extra billions of dollars needed to make their latest
ill-conceived plans add up?
If your head is spinning after this brief tour of the Pentagon's budget
labyrinth, it should be. That's just what the Pentagon wants its painfully
complicated budget practices to do: leave Congress, any administration, and
the public too confused and exhausted to actually hold it accountable for
how our tax dollars are being spent. So far, they're getting away with it.
William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Arms and
Security Project at the Center for International Policy and a senior adviser
to the Security Assistance Monitor. He is the author of, among other books,
Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial
Complex.
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Copyright 2016 William D. Hartung
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176144