From the New Yorker:
'. . . often in recent times expensive weapons projects have been given priority over mundane improvements that would help the military here and now. Earlier this year, for instance, the Senate cut funding for night-vision goggles for soldiers, while adding money to buy three new V-22 Ospreys, a plane that Dick Cheney himself tried to get rid of when he was Secretary of Defense. Similarly, we might have been able to afford appropriate body armor for the troops, and plates for the Hummers in Baghdad, if we were building only one new model of multi-billion-dollar jet fighter, instead of two.' (source: http://www.newyorker.com/...)
This war seems to have been constructed from the outset as an elaborate ruse; a sort of Potemkin war. All of the money has gone to highly visible things -- flashy weapons, promises of assistance to Iraq, etc. As the article points out, however, the money isn't being well-spent even within the scope of these projects. Instead it seems it's all for talking points; the President can say we've spent x billion dollars in Iraq, but what's really happened is a large chunk of that has come back into American pockets, it hasn't really bought much for the Iraqis. If we were to analyze the Bush administration's seriousness about the "war on terror" based on the numbers, they'd come up seriously lacking.
And, for all of Rumsfeld's bellowing about restructuring the military there has been little change in the thinking about appropriations. Where is the increase in the budget for better training for Special Forces troops, for instance? Or how about a "smarter" military, and by that I mean better training for the men and women in uniform? Is it really better to invest in robots for the battlefield, or language training so we have troops that can actually speak Arabic? If the military has changed, its become more inefficient under the misguided leadership of the civilians in the Pentagon. But this is par for the course; that's what happens when you bring a Cold War mindset to a modern asymmetrical conflict. Or, as the author of the article puts it:
'Even more strikingly, while we pour money into all these new projects we're underfunding crucial homeland-security programs. In the past few months, Congress has eliminated six hundred and fifty million dollars for port security. Funding for New York City's security projects was cut forty per cent. And we cut nearly a hundred million from the requested budget for preventing the use of nuclear weapons in the U.S. Those cuts were considered necessary for budgetary reasons, yet the price of all of them together was less than a third of what it will cost to build a single destroyer. That ship will offer us not a whit of protection in the war on terror. But we can be sure it will keep the seas safe from the Soviet Navy.'
Perhaps its because new body armor doesn't look as good as a sleek new jet fighter on Fox News. It can't do flybys and invoke feelings of patriotism in the voting public in the same way. It doesn't provide for weapons-worship in avaiation magazines or look cool at the Paris airshow. But it can shoot down MiGs, none of which we've encountered in an extended combat situation since Vietnam.
Or perhaps this Administration wishes it was fighting a war larger and more important than our current wars. One with invading hordes who have the firepower to compete with even our least-spectacular aircraft or navy ships. It's hard to say, and it's probably a combination of a number of factors, but the numbers don't lie. This Administration is enthralled to big machines and initiatives, to the detriment of less-spectacular measures that could actually win a war. They may say that they're dedicated to fighting terrorism, but the numbers don't lie. The real question is who is the enemy that warrants such extravagant spending.