Pentagon Hypes ‘Russian Threat’ to Increase Budget, While Suppressing Reports of Waste
SputnikNews.com
06.12.2016
Senior US military officials are sticking with a tried and true method for justifying increases in US military spending by claiming that there is a “threat” posed by Russia, pointing to a recent increase in defense spending by the Kremlin.
Air Force Secretary Deborah James recently claimed that Russia is an “existential threat” to the US, AntiWar.com reported. Statistics show that Russia does not spend anywhere near the amount of money spent by the US military, as Washington trounces that of the rest of the world in defense spending. The US defense budget just about exceeds the sum of the next-14 highest spenders combined, according to an International Institute for Strategic Studies 2016 Military Balance Report.
Even if Russia increased its defense budget, it is unlikely to outpace US military spending that has continuously grown since the Reagan administration, even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, its arch-enemy.
Hyping Russia as a demonic threat comes amid a new investigative report that highlights that the Pentagon covered up an internal study showing billions in wasteful spending, so that Congress would not cut the military budget. Confidential documents obtained by the Washington Post show that Pentagon officials sought to clean up bureaucratic waste and transfer the savings back into operations. When administrative waste was estimated at a whopping $125 billion, defense officials killed the report by discrediting and suppressing the results, according to the newspaper.
The Washington Post study also revealed that the Pentagon employs approximately 1 million contractors, civilians, and uniformed personnel to support their 1.3 million active-duty troops, indicating that their are almost as many desk-job employees at the DoD as there are actual troops.
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