US defense industry frets about high Iraq spending

[Raydawg1234]

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A surprising group of protesters is starting to voice concerns about the high level of spending on the U.S. occupation of Iraq: the defense industry.

While many companies benefit from supplying vehicles and guns to U.S. troops in Iraq, some defense firms and industry experts are concerned that money spent on Iraq is taking away from more lucrative, longer-term multibillion-dollar programs.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060206/us_nm/arms_iraq_dc


I guess Bush's war is backfiring for his "base." LOL. They get what they deserve!!!

[fearnobush]

1. Only the most loyal like KBR, Helliberton, GE are welcome to pillage

from the public trough.

[Crazy Canuck]

3. Good point

sometimes it's hard to remember that not ALL the big corporations are completely corrupt.

[Selatius]

4. Risky assumption, imho

It could be that the corporations that are bitching are bitching because they're not seeing as much money spent on their programs as programs sponsored by Halliburton or Bechtel. Just because a corporatist regime is in power doesn't mean all corporatists are served by that regime. There's factions among them as well, and they fight each other for power.

[Raydawg1234]

5. Wait a minute, that doesn't mean they are not corrupt. It means they

don't want to get shut out of the money. This is the military industrial complex we're talking about here. They don't care about the wellbeing of the nation, they care about their bottom line. Who knows if we really need these new "weapons projects." It's pure greed.

[punpirate]

2. Bald-faced lying...

... those longer-term programs are being funded. Look at the defense appropriations separate and apart from war spending supplementals. They ain't hurtin'. They just want more gravy--easy R&D projects that don't require them to actually produce anything at a fixed price.

This is, frankly, obscene.

[wakeme2008]

6. No totally true

they are cutting funding for a number of high $$ planes, plane parts and high $$ ships.

[punpirate]

8. Well, maybe you're parsing what they're saying a bit too broadly...

... in fact, they are deferring purchases on existing delivery programs (as in the case of the F-22) to the out years and spending just as much or more on other projects. They haven't actually killed any large project yet. When one part of a project has shown itself to be useless (land-based missile defense, for example), they've simply shifted spending to another project yet to be proven useless (sea-based missile defense, for example). That's part of the reason they've just announced a twenty-year development program for space-based weapons.

And that's part of my point. Contracts for purchases are fixed price. R&D is much broader, and much more open-ended and capable of being abused.

Ask yourself this. If spending is going down for high-dollar purchased items, and war spending is allocated separately in supplemental requests disassociated from standard DoD appropriations, why has defense spending climbed 41% since 2001? If they are cutting big-ticket items, why is this year's budget request larger than the one last year?

Cheers.

[Journeyman]

7. As happened with the Vietnam debacle . . .

eventually the business community began to express reservations and regrets, and shortly thereafter the troops were withdrawn.