tomsdispatch | Washington is pushing the panic button, claiming austerity is
hollowing out our armed forces and our national security is at risk.
That was the message Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel delivered last
week when he announced that the Army would shrink to levels not seen
since before World War II. Headlines about this crisis followed in papers like the New York Times
and members of Congress issued statements swearing that they would
never allow our security to be held hostage to the budget-cutting
process.
Yet a careful look at budget figures for the U.S. military -- a bureaucratic juggernaut accounting for 57% of the federal discretionary budget and nearly 40% of all military spending on this planet -- shows that such claims have been largely fictional. Despite cries of doom
since the across-the-board cuts known as sequestration surfaced in
Washington in 2011, the Pentagon has seen few actual reductions, and
there is no indication that will change any time soon.
This piece of potentially explosive news has, however, gone missing
in action -- and the “news” that replaced it could prove to be one of
the great bait-and-switch stories of our time.
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