CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. ― The USS Gerald R. Ford, the new aircraft carrier President Donald Trump praised recently, is costing some $13 billion to build. That doesn’t count the airplanes. It’s the most expensive naval vessel in history, and it will fit easily into the “massive” military buildup Trump has demanded.
But at Camp Lejeune, the sprawling Marine Corps base where the working-class military lives, trains and deploys, there’s not enough money for Cpl. Edward L. Kiser, an anti-tank gunner, to train properly. Kiser, a 20-year-old from Butler, Pennsylvania, needs to be proficient at firing TOW missiles in the desperate heat of battle to kill enemy tanks about to overrun his position. “I’ve been in the Marine Corps two years, and I’ve only shot the thing one time,” said Kiser.
The U.S. soldiers and Marines confronting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria are facing so-called “rag-tag” fighters equipped with tiny surveillance and attack drones, which let those forces hunt down Americans and kill them from the sky.
Americans have neither. Again, no money for that.
Trump, who positions himself as the champion of the working class, has promised to pump billions more into the military. Yet the initial numbers suggest those who really benefit will be the ones who always benefit: the big defense contractors and their enablers at the Pentagon and Congress. The last people to see that flood of spending will be the ones most likely to fight and die: the grunts.
The vast majority of those killed in combat are infantry, but they get short-changed on the resources.
Only the outlines of Trump’s proposal to lavish money on the military have been drawn up. There’s a request for Congress to add $30 billion to this year’s defense budget and a vague plan to add $54 billion to next year’s spending.
Not included in those plans: money for the best infantry weapons, the safest troop-lift helicopters, the most protective lightweight body armor. Instead, grunts will have to settle for budget leftovers with antiquated rifles, helicopters built for their grandfathers during the Vietnam War and communications gear that is overweight and unreliable.
Much of the money will be hoovered up for gold-plated weapon systems like the USS Ford, F-35 fighters ($95 million each), nuclear weapons ($40 billion a year) and Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines ($5 billion apiece). None of these weapon systems get nearly as much direct combat exposure ― if any ― as the soldiers and Marines under fire today in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. But the stuff they need just isn’t as dramatic as an F-35 fighter, doesn’t provide the thousands of home-district jobs that politicians love and fails to offer the high profits that drive defense contractors.
In the request that Trump just sent up to Capitol Hill, for instance, he asked for $5.8 billion extra for Navy and Air Force fighter jets, but only $750 million more for Army weapons and heavy combat vehicles. Military personnel accounts are slated for just $977 million more, mostly for a 2.1 percent pay increase signed into law by President Barack Obama in December. Accounts that cover new family housing got nothing.
None of this is particularly new. “Four out of five of those killed in our wars are infantry, but they get 1 percent of our national resources,” said Robert H. Scales, a combat-decorated Army major general now retired.
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Originally Posted by Dan Druff
Read some articles about the clusterfuck that was Obamacare (before, during, and presently) and you'll understand.
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