Battleland

Private Benjamin: A Coalition Just For You

  • Share
  • Read Later
Michael Ochs / Getty Images

Goldie Hawn in the 1980 movie, "Private Benjamin".

Like mushrooms spouting after a summer thunderstorm, there are all kinds of groups sprouting to denounce the prospect of sequestration – those pending budget cuts that could lop off up to $600 billion in Pentagon spending over the coming decade.

The latest: the Coalition to Save Our Military Shopping Benefits.

Instead of what Donald Rumsfeld called the coalition of the willing, we’ve now got the coalition of the shopping. Ot, perhaps more accurately, the coalition of the selling.

No surprise that the fellow serving as president of this particular coalition also ran the Defense Commissary Agency from 2001 to 2007.

It has become increasingly clear that there is a crust of hangers-on that have affixed themselves like barnacles to the military-industrial-complex-gravy-train and don’t want to get off.