The Pentagon sponsored a first-of-its-kind war game last month focused not on bullets and bombs - but on how hostile nations might seek to cripple the U.S. economy, a scenario made all the more real by the global financial crisis.
The two-day event near Ft. Meade, Maryland, had all the earmarks of a regular war game. Participants sat along a V-shaped set of desks beneath an enormous wall of video monitors displaying economic data, according to the accounts of three participants.
“It felt a little bit like Dr. Strangelove,” one person who was at the previously undisclosed exercise told POLITICO.
Gates' budget shakes up the Pentagon Wed, 08 Apr 2009 03:49:43 -0500
Summary:
Robert Gates has announced the Pentagon’s proposed 2010 budget and, no surprises, they’re asking for more money. But. They want to spend it differently because, they’re saying, “conventional warfare against other states” is out and “counter-insurgency operations against non-state actors” is in. Introducing the 'War on Terror' Investment Strategy
Just zip through the five paragraphs below and then, if you haven’t digested Introducing the ‘War on Terror’ Investment Strategy, you’ll wanna do that — but hot off the press is also a very timely piece by uber-muckraker Michael T. Klare — which is an absolute MUST read:
Everything you ever wanted to know about wtf, but were afraid to ask.
[Posted By microdot]
By Daniel Luban and Ali Gharib
Republished from Asia Times
The breakdown of the US$534 million budget for fiscal year 2010 will be considerably different from previous years.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates unveiled the United States’ much-anticipated new military budget on Monday, which aims to re-orient the armed forces towards irregular and counter-insurgency warfare while proposing cuts in several major weapons programs.
The budget is viewed as a major step in the ongoing debate within the US military about whether to focus primarily on conventional warfare against other states, or counter-insurgency operations against non-state actors.
“They’re calling it a fundamental shift and that’s both true and false,” said Miriam Pemberton, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. “It’s true because their budget proposes the most ambitious set of cuts to well-entrenched weapons systems since the early 1990s.
“It’s false, though, because this budget perpetuates the upward trajectory of defense spending, it’s higher than any of the Bush budgets that preceded it, and it increases funding for some programs that I think are a mistake,” Pemberton continued.
The breakdown of the US$534 million budget for fiscal year 2010 – which does not take into account the “emergency supplemental” appropriations that pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – will be considerably different from previous years. [end excerpt] Full article here: Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs
