WaPo | With Tuesday’s election results, President Obama and Congress should
take steps to end “the warfare state” instituted by the George W. Bush
White House.
No one can deny that threats to U.S. security exist around the
world. But the Defense Department needs continued reform to meet those
varied threats and to cut the most costly elements in the core Pentagon
budget that were developed for past wars.
Starting in 2003, the
United States for the first time fought wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan,
without a tax to pay for them. Ironically, the core Defense budget
during the Bush administration was supposed to include funds for such
events.
The September 2001 quadrennial review, which laid the
policy foundation for the Bush fiscal 2003 Pentagon budget, called for
forces that could “swiftly defeat aggression in overlapping major
conflicts while preserving for the president the option to call for a
decisive victory in one of those conflicts — including the possibility
of regime change or occupation.” That sounds a lot like foreseeing the
invasion of Iraq that came 18 months later. The plan said the military
also could, within the proposed budget, “Conduct a limited number of
smaller-scale contingency operations.”
Still, supplemental budgets were sought for the two wars, putting the costs, now near $1.5 trillion, on a credit card.
