Posts
Readers of this blog may have noticed a series of postings with the subtitle: Flush With Cash, Running on Empty.
My goal in these postings is to provide a series of occasional essays, which taken together, describe how the behavioral pathologies in the Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex (MICC) result in a boom and bust pattern of defense spending. This pattern produces a long-term death spiral of shrinking forces, equipped with aging weapons, and continual pressure to reduce readiness.
Understanding how MICC's behaviour creates this crisis is particularly important in this election year (2016), because President Obama is bequeathing bow wave of new programs in the FY17-21 budget plan that embodies costs that will explode early in the next decade. While bow waves are always present the Pentagon's budget plans, they wax and wane. This budget time bomb, which will be the third waxing since the end of the Viet Nam War, will have a spending tail out to 2030 or beyond, and this spending bomb will require a militarized foreign policy to rationalize it -- in effect the MICC's spending tail will continue wag the foreign policy dog of the United States.
For ease of access, the links to these occasional essays will be collected and posted on a new page on the left hand column of the home page of this blog entitled: Flush With Cash, Running on Empty: A Series of Posts on the Defense Budget.
