Two weeks ago, we posted a chart from a Government Accountability Office report that showed U.S. levels of defense spending remain at historic highs, with or without sequestration.
Now the Congressional Budget Office has issued a report that shows the same thing, in the chart above.
Battleland thinks the Pentagon should spend less time worrying about incoming missiles, and come up with some leakproof shields against incoming charts that show its repeated cries of poverty to be bogus.
“In real terms, after the reduction in 2013, DoD’s base budget is about what it was in 2007,” the CBO reports, “and is still 7% above the average funding since 1980.”
Of course, all this is accountants’ talk. To hear what it’s like at the tip of the spear, check out what Michael Haft and Harrison Suarez, two former Marines who spent much of 2011 in Afghanistan, wrote Tuesday over at Best Defense:
The inspector general’s sign said to contact him in case of fraud, waste, or abuse. We laughed cynically about which issue he might find most egregious.
Would it be the non-alcoholic beer shipped around the world into Afghanistan? The civilian contractors who slept all day in their hootches and ignored the war going on around them? The ostentatious Post Exchange at the Marine Corps’s headquarters in Helmand Province, with its aisles lined by televisions, air conditioners, and stereos?
Or maybe it would be the money-losing commissaries back in the United States, a system of grocery stores receiving $1.5 billion in federal subsidies every year? Or perhaps the Semper Fit girls in Camp Lejeune, who acted like personal trainers but seemed like little more than beneficiaries of a welfare program for Marine dependents?
…If we’ve seen such excess in the Marine Corps — traditionally the most frugal service and one that receives just 4 percent of the defense budget — we can only imagine the extent to which it takes place in the other branches.