- In detailing its request for $87bn (¥77bn, ?55bn)
to fund the "war on terrorism" for the forthcoming year, the
White House budget office said this week that a vast majority of those
funds - $51bn - would go directly to military operations in Iraq.
-
- It noted that $800m of that spending would go to coalition
members who cannot afford to deploy their own troops. An additional $300m
would go to new life-saving body armour; and $140m to heavily armoured
Humvees to protect its soldiers.
-
- But apart from those few details, the Bush administration
has been tight-lipped about where the huge sums - which come on top of
$62bn appropriated for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in April
- are going. Because Iraq military efforts are being funded outside the
normal appropriations process, in so-called "supplemental" or
emergency spending bills, the funding does not go through the same rigorous
congressional oversight to which normal Pentagon spending is subject annually.
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- As a result, the spending is difficult to track, leading
to concerns among some members of Congress, and experts in Pentagon budgeting,
about the Defence Department's accountability.
-
- John Hamre, a former Pentagon budget chief who headed
the administration-backed team of external experts to examine rebuilding
efforts this summer, has said the $4bn a month the Defence Department is
spending on military operations is high even by Pentagon standards: "A
lot of people I know can't figure out why that number is so expensive."
-
- Much of the money, experts said, is directly tied to
the high levels of US troops in the region, which include more than 122,000
army personnel inside Iraq and 40,000 combined forces in neighbouring Kuwait.
-
- The cost of paying the nearly 130,000 reservists who
have been called up to support the effort - about the same number as activated
during the war - is hugely expensive, as is the price tag on flying in
tons of supplies.
-
- "There's this presumption of, 'Pay me now and we'll
get the books straight later'," says Christopher Hellman, a military
spending expert at the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. "That's
fine for a while but if you do this over a long period of time, if the
paperwork doesn't catch up, it raises a lot of questions."
-
- Some respected Democrats are already asking those questions.
John Spratt, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives' budget committee,
this week questioned whether similar multi-billion-dollar requests would
be coming in 2005 and 2006. "The president has levelled with us but
he has only lifted the veil on what's needed now," Mr Spratt said.
-
- Operations continuing in places such as Bosnia and Kosovo
are funded out of the Pentagon's regular annual budget. But including Iraqi
operations in annual operations would push the Defence Department's yearly
funding to about $450bn, a figure that might well raise hackles in Congress
and force deeper cuts in prized weapons programmes.
-
- In some respects, the opacity of the Pentagon's spending
in Iraq is by design. Indeed, when the Bush administration first approached
Congress for additional war-related spending during last year's budget
negotiations, it suggested a $10bn "contingency fund" be tacked
on to the Pentagon's annual 2003 budget - essentially a slush fund.
-
- The Congress rejected the proposal but the department
made a similar request in March when it sought its first supplemental spending
bill. Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon comptroller, asked that 96 per cent of
the $62bn requested go into what he termed a "Defence Emergency Response
Fund", which would have given the department wide flexibility to spend
money as it sees fit.
-
- Congress balked again, cutting the amount the Pentagon
could freely spend to $9bn - and requiring five days' notice before even
that could be spent. Because documents for the new supplemental have yet
to be sent to Capitol Hill, it is unclear whether the Pentagon will seek
that route again. But in making the request in March, Mr Zakheim insisted
it was necessary to cut the bureaucratic complications that frequently
tie fighter's hands in war.
-
- "The reason you do that is that it gives you the
ability to transfer funds from one account to another," he said at
the time. "If you lock them into particular accounts, you may be overfunding
one account, underfunding another account, and then you can't move the
monies around. So we want to allocate the monies based on actual execution."
-
- Budget experts argue, however, that such efforts are
part of a strategy by Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, to centralise
decision-making in his office.
-
- "It definitely fits in with Rumsfeld's view of a
streamlined, centrally controlled Pentagon," says Mr Hellman.
-
- Noticed at http://www.informationclearingh
ouse.info/
-
-
- Comment
- From A.V. Enger
- 9-12-3
-
- I just read "Mystery Shrouds Pentagon's Extra Funds"
(9/12/03 on your site). The way I see it (that is, by simply looking up
when I go outside), the world-wide spraying mission in the skies (aka Chemtrails)
must be costing billions.
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- And since the US Government steadfastly refuses to tell
its citizens what is really going on up there, it cannot very well OPENLY
appropriate the funds for the spraying operation. Thus, the funds are "hidden"
in Pentagon requests.
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- Let them prove it is not so!
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