1. The Gift of 9/11

It cost $400,000 and change for Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda to pull off the 9/11 attacks, according to the authoritative estimate of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission appointed by President George W. Bush.  But within days of the hijacking, Bush requested fifty thousand times that amount -- $20 billion -- to counter any such future attacks.  By the time he leaves office, trillions of dollars will have been spent on what he all-too-cleverly dubbed the Global War on Terror (GWOT), with no end in sight and no logical connection between the money spent and the problem at hand.  In this respect, Bush’s reaction to 9/11 was all too typical.       

The one thing they know how to do is spend money.  For those who run the federal government, tragedy can be opportunity, and none so fortuitous than that represented by a frightful threat from abroad.  Some wise political leaders have had the temerity to warn about the consequences of exploiting the “foreign engagements” cited in George Washington’s Farewell Address. Others caution as to the dangers presented by the “military-industrial complex,” that amalgam of the vast defense industry and U.S. military bureaucracy noted in Dwight Eisenhower’s own parting presidential speech to the nation.  But the norm is to begin to line the pockets of those who claim to defend us from the enemy at the gates with few questions asked about where the money is going. 

It proved to be too good an opportunity for George W. Bush to pass up.  Although he had de-emphasized foreign policy in his campaign and seemed to embrace the “new world order" of his father, favoring trade and diplomacy over military intervention, the post-9/11 Bush quickly recast himself as a wartime leader, a “war president,” as he put it.  While he had campaigned as a fiscal conservative and had promised a more modest defense buildup than the Democratic Gore-Lieberman ticket, he suddenly turned on the spigot full blast for Pentagon spending.

In a matter of days, "W" was no longer his father’s son.  In the months to come, he and his vice president, who had been a prudent secretary of defense during the first Bush presidency, would reverse his father’s course.  Those who didn’t come along, like Colin Powell, would be ignored or exiled.  Instead of the veterans of his father’s administration, such as Brent Scowcroft and James Baker, Bush the Younger suddenly would embrace a neoconservative cabal that had united, most of all, in their shared contempt for the moderate foreign policy of his own father.  

The first President Bush, a genuine war hero like Washington and Eisenhower, governed as a man of peace wary of the dangers of militarism.  Indeed, it was precisely his restrained response in the first Gulf War, and his refusal to use that conflagration as an excuse to ramp up the post-Cold War Pentagon budget, that left him vulnerable to criticism from more bellicose quarters. 

Bush I, once smeared as ineffectively dovish by the military hawks who fixated on his prescient wisdom in stopping short of occupying Iraq, was denied the second term that his quick but measured reaction to Saddam’s aggression might have earned.  But he had demonstrated the logic of a sincere multinational approach to the world’s problems, and even though his then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney publicly endorsed that policy, Cheney and others eventually would turn against the “realist” approach of Bush I and join the neocon believers in a unilateral Pax Americana in response to 9/11.

Bush II lacked his father’s seasoning in the consequences of war, and it is possible that his response to the stark assault of 9/11 was more startled swagger than measured confrontation.  “Bring ‘em on” was for Bush more a matter of thoughtless rhetoric than the substance of a considered foreign policy.  As opposed to his father, who had fought courageously in a war and then served in key foreign policy positions as ambassador to China, head of the CIA, and vice president, George W. came to office without any serious history of involvement with the world.  He had barely traveled abroad—some wilder frat boy-type adventures in Mexico and a visit with his ambassador father in China, which he abruptly cut short because it was “boring”—were, prior to his becoming president, the extent of his engagement with an increasingly complex and interdependent world.

But the shock, or a cynic might say the opportunity, of the 9/11 attacks changed all that.  For the rest of his time in office, Bush surrendered his presidency to those who identified national security with a wildly expansive U.S. presence in the world. And for the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower had warned against, Bush’s transformation represented an end to the menace of fiscal restraint and the windfall of new money from the government in Washington.

During the ten years before 9/11, Bush I and Clinton had presided over a post-Cold War era in which military confrontation was defended as a last recourse to be undertaken only when diplomacy failed, and then only with significant international support.

For the hawks—a disparate group of defense executives with a product to sell, politicians seeking re-election, and Pax Americana neocon ideologues—it was the worst of times.  Those who had come to identify their own fortunes and that of the nation with massive military spending had been cast into a sorrowful limbo.  Without a well-armed enemy in sight, the rationale for their massive claim on public funds had critically eroded.

Then the clouds parted after the attacks of 9/11.  Suddenly, these defense hawks and profiteers saw their moment, and the world of danger that had so rewarded them previously was reborn.  Given the opportunity of a new international scourge to be combated—this time not communism but terrorism—there was much work to be done, and they knew just who could do it. 

But would the new President Bush rise to the occasion?  The hawks had their concerns; the president had never been much interested in foreign policy, let alone in fundamentally altering the world, and Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser, along with Powell, had at times uttered words of reason and caution.  Powell was a particular problem, in that he spoke with the authority of a veteran of battles that should not have been fought, and he seemed to be another war hero-turned-peacenik determined to avoid unnecessary wars. 

However, there were the others in the administration of this untutored president who acted after 9/11 as if they never had met a war, or more important, an increase in military spending, that they couldn’t endorse.  Donald Rumsfeld flirted with Pentagon reform but did a quick about-face after the attacks.  Then there was Dick Cheney, who had changed quite a bit since his days in the first Bush Administration.

Cheney had moved through the revolving door between government and defense contractor Halliburton, where he was CEO, and had grown much closer to the neoconservatives, even signing off, as did Rumsfeld, on their Project for the New American Century, a neocon think tank whose agenda was strengthening America's military.  Cheney and Rumsfeld criticized Clinton for not spending enough on defense, even though Clinton had exceeded the budget inherited from Cheney himself when he was secretary of defense in the outgoing Bush I administration.

Other members of the Bush II administration who had signed on to PNAC were Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, among others.  The neocon ideologues cannot be faulted for being secretive in their designs.  The plan, some might say fantasy, was to seize the opportunity to beef up the military might of the world’s only superpower, “to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests,” as was clearly laid out in the PNAC’s founding statement.

Suddenly, they had an unimagined opportunity to implement their vision, and they were not about to waste it.  Old war plans were dusted off and historic grievances revisited, beginning with Iraq.  The key neocon ideologues, with Wolfowitz as their most powerfully placed member, long had their sights set on overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq, one of the goals of PNAC, and the lobbying for that position was soon fierce and persistent, as Richard Clarke and others on the opposing side in the Bush administration have documented.

However, it was not altogether clear that they would carry the day with the president, who during his campaign had criticized Clinton’s military intervention in Haiti as misguided “nation-building.”  But while there was disagreement in the administration as to where and when to intervene militarily in response to 9/11, there was broad agreement about the need to build up the Pentagon.  In that endeavor, they found a chorus of support among the defense industry lobbyists and their congressional allies, who know well how to seize an opportunity when it’s presented to garner funding.

As dust from the debris was yet settling on the disasters of the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the White House, still woefully unclear as to the perpetrators and purposes of the attack, gave defense hawks what they wanted.  The president drafted a request to Congress for that immediate allocation of $20 billion, chump change in the federal budget, but it set the tone for how the administration would now respond to the suddenly acknowledged threat of terrorism. 

The amount, in terms of the spending that was to come, was very small—rivaling merely a decade’s worth of U.S. humanitarian assistance to the rest of the world.  However, such opportunity cost comparisons are rarely deemed relevant when it comes to the military budget.  Unlike penny-pinching discussions concerning the cost of social programs, as for the military, it is difficult to get politicians or the media even to acknowledge the distinction between a million and a billion, let alone the trillion that the totally irrelevant Iraq war came to cost as part of the president’s war on terror.  But that first of a series of rising military budget requests set the basic tone for the new era of incredible waste. For the Pentagon, big money was once again in play.

With the stroke of a letter to the Speaker of the House requesting that $20 billion down payment on this war, the president managed to fulfill the twin purposes of the national security budget—such a misnomer—by both rewarding his financial supporters in the defense industry and politically exploiting the concerns of a frightened nation.  The sigh of relief among those whose livelihoods depend on maintaining the largest military machine at a cost approximating the combined expenditures of all other world nations, friend and foe, was palpable. 

With the sudden demise of the Soviet Union a decade earlier, the military-industrial complex had lost its reason for being.  The enemy in the Cold War was no more, but the real purpose of the bloated military budget, profit and jobs, persisted. And for those who stood to profit, the tragedy of 9/11 came to be viewed as a gift that would never stop giving.  Communism may have come and gone as a bogeyman, but terrorism had been with us ever since a cave dweller first threatened his neighbors with a stone, and the war on terror, which Bush quickly branded this new offensive, was a splendid—and better yet, everlasting—surrogate for the Cold War.

 The president’s initial request for funding was presented as a stopgap measure, an early pittance of an installment on a spending binge that would in six years attain and then surpass the heights of Cold War budgets.  Most amazing of all, it would end up financing many of the expensive weapons on the boards from the previous era that were obviously no longer justifiable in any sense except as a source of jobs and huge profit. 

But who would notice in a nation traumatized by what the government and media propaganda machines were trumpeting from the first hours as a stunning attack that they shamelessly compared to the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor?  No matter that the ragtag band of religious fanatics who attacked this time did not possess an air force, other than the commercial one they commandeered from us on 9/11.  This was war, and we needed to spend money to fight it.  The surge of patriotism and the feeling of vulnerability following the attacks would leave few of any influence in Congress or the media daring to challenge this expenditure, or the doubling of the defense budget over the next six years.

Most of that new money was earmarked not for homeland security but rather for military expeditions abroad, beginning the most rapid peacetime buildup in American history.  The result six years later was the Pentagon budget for fiscal 2008 reaching a staggering $625 billion.  Even after accounting for inflation, that leaves the Defense Department budget for the war on terror larger than at any time since the end of World War Two, including the years covering the Korean and Vietnam wars, as well as the Reagan buildup in the 1980s.  And that is just for the Defense Department.  Virtually every cabinet level department, including the newly created Department of Homeland Security, managed to get a piece of the war-on-terror budget. 

What came to be known as “homeland security funding” was allocated to almost every government agency, and by the 2008 budget year, that slush fund had grown to $57.8 billion, with the largest share, $26.9 billion, allocated to the Homeland Security Department itself, created after 9/11.  All of this of course proved a boon to the fortunes of the military-industrial complex.  When all defense and security appropriations are combined, Winslow Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information and an expert on military spending estimates conservatively that the 2008 national security budget totals $878 billion.

No matter that the enemy precipitating this deluge of dollars was not a new Soviet-type empire with ten thousand nuclear weapons and a four-million man army but rather a small band of one hundred fifty or so terrorist thugs, a few of whom attacked us with pepper spray, Mace, and inexpensive knives of the Swiss Army and Leatherman varieties.  No, this was an opportunity to resurrect a defense industry producing the most sophisticated weapons that had next to nothing to do with defeating terrorism but which comprised the totems of the religion of militarism: sleek and enormously expensive objects to be worshipped for their aura of power rather than their ability to smite one’s enemies, real or imagined. 

As with other religions among America’s mega-churches, the militarist sect fulfills the need for pseudo-spiritual purpose and commercial avarice, its god an amalgam of pious patriot and righteous banker who views greed as a virtue.  For the next seven years, George W. preached this gospel, and a devoted and eager flock of defense contractors rewarded him with contributions.  Homage to the military-industrial complex, where profiteering and the national interest are inextricably intertwined, provided Bush with a sense of eternal order in the wake of the chaos of 9/11. 

“Yesterday, evil and despicable acts of terror were perpetrated against our fellow citizens.  Our way of life, indeed our very freedom, came under attack,” the President wrote in his Sept. 11 letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives.  He knew very little about the attacks, but he knew that spending money, lots of it, would reassure the public: “I ask the Congress to immediately pass and send to me the enclosed request for $20,000,000,000 in FY [fiscal year] 2001 emergency appropriations to provide resources to address the terrorist attacks on the United States that occurred on Sept 11, 2001, and the consequences of such attacks.  Passing this supplemental appropriations bill without delay will send a powerful signal of unity to our fellow Americans and to the world.  If additional resources are necessary, I will forward another request for additional funding.”

Of course, the president already had access to enormous sums in the existing budget to allocate immediately, but his insistent demand for fresh money set the tone for the wildly excessive post-9/11 budgets to come.  The initial $20 billion would quickly grow to a hundred billion, then a trillion, to fight this new “global war on terror,” as it came to be referred to in the president’s speeches and as “GWOT” in budget language throughout the federal government.  The use of the word “war” was essential to justifying massive military spending to combat an enemy that had succeeded not with an army or sophisticated weaponry but only because of security system lapses that would require relatively minor expenditures to fix. 

Getting the FBI, CIA and Customs to communicate with each other about suspected terrorists would likely have prevented the lead hijackers from entering the country.  Since fifteen of the “muscle” guys carried perfectly legal Saudi passports and were issued visas in that country, demanding accountability from the Saudi regime we had consistently coddled would have helped.  Returning sky marshals to the airplanes from which they had been withdrawn at the request of the airlines unwilling to surrender first class seats, and requiring safe cockpit doors, which the airplane manufacturers failed to build, also would have diminished the odds for the terrorists. 

It was obvious, even in the first weeks after 9/11, that the problem was not a lack of money but rather a meager attention span.  There had been official disregard from the White House to the clearly telegraphed intentions of bin Laden to attack inside the United States.  Condoleezza Rice testified as much in May, 2004 at the 9/11 Commission hearings, when she revealed that the president’s top-secret daily briefing memo given to Bush on August 6, 2001, was titled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” As Bob Woodward and Dan Eggen wrote in the Washington Post, the memo “was primarily focused on recounting al Qaeda's past efforts to attack and infiltrate the United States, senior administration officials said.  The document … underscored that Osama bin Laden and his followers hoped to ‘bring the fight to America,’ in part as retaliation for U.S. missile strikes on al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan in 1998, according to knowledgeable sources.”

Getting your national security adviser to pay attention to a blinking red warning light should have been corrected with a stiff reprimand from the president rather than quickly throwing billions of taxpayer dollars at a vague target.  But of course the president also deserved a reprimand, having systematically ignored warnings from the Clinton administration that an attack was coming.  Unfortunately, the focus of this Bush administration had been on the drug war and not on terrorism at all. In one startling example of that, the Bush administration funneled $43 million in U.S. aid, to be distributed by an arm of the United Nations, to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.  Secretary of State Colin Powell announced the gift, specifically mentioning opium crop suppression as the rationale and assuring that the United States would “continue to look for ways to provide more assistance to the Afghans.” 

Less than three months later, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for South Asia, Christine B. Rocca, met with Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, in Islamabad.  According to the Associated Press, Rocca announced that, “[i]n recognition of the Taliban’s elimination of opium,” the Bush administration was donating $1.5 million to the United Nations Drug Control Program for crop substitution.”  This friendly meeting, which Zaeef called “very successful,” took place on August 2, 2001—four days before Bush received his now-infamous briefing on the imminent threat from al Qaeda agents directed from Afghanistan who were already in sleeper cells in the U.S., armed with explosives.  The terror threat had just not been as important as the war on drugs.

But 9/11 changed all that.  An administration that had been slow to respond to threats of danger became quick to request billions of dollars for the military establishment, as if this could have prevented the crisis.  This strategy cleverly served the dual purpose of deflecting the public’s attention from the administration’s security lapses while leading Americans to believe that spending billions would make them safer.  In the confusion following 9/11, that tactic, irrational as it obviously was, worked wonderfully for the president’s previously sagging poll numbers.  

The largest share of the first $20 billion post-9/11 appropriation, $7.4 billion, would be sent to the Department of Defense for “crisis and recovery operations and national security responsibilities,” even though no one had yet figured out what weapons had been used to bring down the planes, let alone the nature of the enemy that had directed the attacks.  What was clearly known was that the attacks were low-tech—airplane hijacking was after all not unheard of—and their use as destructive missiles had previously been attempted by the cousin of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed.  In addition, there was ample warning that such a tactic should be anticipated in the future. 

Nothing about this attack suggested the involvement of a sophisticated military arsenal or even a state player, but the response, as evidenced by the invasion of Iraq, was to act as if the “evil empire” envisioned by Reagan had risen again, even though Iraq had no connection to 9/11.  The United States proceeded to go to war not against the enemy that existed but rather the one desired by the military-industrial complex.

Money earmarked for the GWOT only represents part of the bonanza of 9/11 reaped by the defense industry, as the rest of the Defense Department budget grew dramatically—even though most of that increase was devoted to weapons that were relics from Cold War planning.  Despite the fact that the collapse of the Soviet empire totally undermined the case for a new generation of planes, there was an enormous capital infusion into building stealth fighter planes designed to evade sophisticated radar systems in the Soviet Union that, like that superpower, no longer existed.  Funding in the billions also was granted for a new generation of nuclear weapons that could never realistically be used to take out terrorists who specialize in finding cover among innocent civilians. 

Consider the stunning example of Lockheed-Martin’s F-22 Raptor fighter at $360 million a pop, with its stealth cover and elaborate electronics designed to counter threatened leaps in Soviet war-fighting capability that had evaporated with the end of the Cold War.  Lawrence Korb, an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, wrote in the Los Angeles Times on August 13, 2005 that, “The F-22 Raptor is the most unnecessary weapon system being built by the Pentagon. In fact, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld tried to do away with it in the summer of 2002 but backed off when his Air Force secretary threatened to resign over the issue. It was originally designed to achieve air superiority over Soviet fighter jets, which will never be built." 

The only thing good to say about this plane is that it the Pentagon is only planning to buy around $64 billion worth, which is considerably less than the $300 billion price tag for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.  That aircraft is also manufactured by Lockheed Martin, the nation’s top defense contractor, and the one that doles out the most in campaign contributions.  Whatever the value of these planes, why should 9/11 be cited by their proponents as justification for their purchase?  As Korb points out, “The performance of the current generation of Air Force fighters in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in the first Persian Gulf War, makes it clear that the Air Force already has the capability to achieve air superiority easily and quickly against any enemy or nation.  To put it bluntly, the Taliban, al Qaeda, and Iraqi insurgents do not have jet fighters for the Raptor to conquer.”

On Sept 9, 2001, two days before the al Qaeda attacks, Knight Ridder Business News carried a report on the strenuous efforts of Lockheed to reverse congressional cuts in the F-22 fighter jet program.  With profit and jobs at stake, lobbyists for the corporations, suppliers, and labor unions involved in the plane’s production were scurrying around Capitol Hill under Lockheed’s direction.  It was not an easy sell, since the proposed plane no longer enjoyed even the most remote claim to military purpose, and according to the Knight Ridder article, “in what critics say is a classic example of the `military-industrial complex’ at work,” the lobbying centered more on jobs than on national security.

Two days later, that all changed.  Even though the F-22 had no conceivable role in preventing future hijackings of civilian planes or any other imagined terrorist tactic, the stealth plane and every other weapons system rendered obsolete with the end of the Cold War were suddenly repackaged as anti-terrorist weapons.  The most ludicrous example of the new antiterrorist mission created for the F-22 was the use of the plane to fly over Florida to protect the launch of space shuttles, presumably from an alien air force capable of shooting down older F-16 planes that might have been assigned to the task.  The point is that the existing fighter fleet was more than adequate to handle any intrusion by a more mundane invader of Florida’s skies.

            The problem with the F-16 is not that it is out of date.  On the contrary the plane has been very successfully modernized over the years and is a fighter much in demand by nations throughout the world.  So much so that Lockheed had to ramp up- production to meet orders from Turkey, Greece, South Korea and India.  At the end of 2007, Lockheed had unfilled orders for 116 F-16s, with more coming in.

Air Force pilots from The Netherlands, which has 213 of the planes, to Israel, with 200, favor the nimble F-16 as a plane of choice.  “It just has incredible staying power,” as a sales item according to Lockheed’s CFO Bruce Tanner.  But that is just the problem.  Why should the U.S. government invest upward of $300 billion to develop and purchase the F-35 or $65 billion on the F-22 when the F-16 is in most regard a better plane?  There are 4,500 F-16s buzzing around the world, and not one has ever been defeated in any air battle. 

The only advantage of the F-35 and the F-22 over the F-16, and one of the aspects that makes those two planes so much more costly, is that they afford a profile and covering that make them less noticeable to sophisticated radar of the sort that the Soviets were expected to develop and never did.  In short, they have no added use other than as new sources of profits when Lockheed gets to replace its older planes with the new ones. 

But the stealthier F-22 was not the only high-tech wonder left purposeless with the end of the Cold War.  The B-2 stealth bomber was designed to penetrate Soviet air defenses to destroy anyone or anything of value that had survived the initial retaliatory strike of our enormous nuclear-armed missile fleet.  Of course, the bombers were redundant because by the time they arrived, if even a minority of the missiles had worked, there would be precious little left to destroy. Building a fleet of stealth bombers at more than $2 billion apiece was patently absurd.

Still, as long as the Cold War had endured, proponents of the B-2, led by primary contractor Northrop Grumman, were successful in making the case for the plane’s development.  What terrible timing for the company that the Cold War was ending when the plane made its first flight test on July 17, 1989.  There were immediate technical problems with the plane--it lost much of its stealth cover in the rain, among other performance issues--but the clear problem for its continued development in the next years was that it had no military purpose.  Indeed, Senator William Cohen of Maine, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee and later secretary of defense under Clinton, predicted in 1989 that, “[t]he B-2 won’t make it.”  He instead called for money to be spent on rapid deployment forces better suited to a post-Cold War world. 

However, the plane, as these weapons systems do, managed to retain some funding despite a lack of utility. Matters did look gloomy when Bush I, in his January 1992 State of the Union speech, announced that the B-2 fleet, once envisioned as totaling 135 aircraft, would be cut back to a mere twenty.  Then came the war on terror, and, amazingly, a use was found for a stealth bomber designed to avoid super-sophisticated defense systems that neither the Taliban regime in Afghanistan nor Saddam Hussein’s in Iraq possessed. 

But don’t let those facts get in the way of a good photo op. There was Vice President Dick Cheney, photographed in the belly of a B-2 bomber parked at Missouri’s Whiteman Air Force Base on October 27, 2006, taking credit for this boondoggle:  “I was proud, as secretary of defense, to be involved with the B-2 program during its early years,” he said, insisting that he was vindicated by the plane’s usefulness in the war on terror:  “To carry on this fight, we need to project force across great distances, to hit targets with precision, and to move and maneuver without the enemy being able to track us.  And that’s exactly what we’re able to do with the stealth technology of the B-2 bomber.  Within weeks of Sept. 11^th, 2001, B-2s were taking off from Whiteman, flying dozens of hours, refueling in flight, dropping precision-guided, satellite-based ammunition on Taliban and al Qaeda targets. …” 

They were not precise enough, however, to have actually hit any of the top leadership of the Taliban or al Qaeda, a function better served by special forces already on the ground, as well as planes already in the vicinity. Then there were those cruise missiles, similar to those that Clinton had ordered fired into al Qaeda base camps before 9/11, to dismal effect.

“The B-2 was critical, as well, to the liberation of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein,” Cheney continued to an audience of military personnel and journalists, who apparently never questioned that absurd statement. “On missions from Whiteman and forward operating locations, B-2s flew more than 40 sorties and delivered hundreds of munitions against enemy targets, helping take down a brutal dictatorship.  These aircraft remain essential to the continuing fight against terror …” Cheney concluded.  He never was asked by his media consort to explain what stealth technology had to do with combating insurgents, who could not have hit one of the bombers used in World War II.

The stealth planes, the B-2s, and F-22s were but two of the weapons designed to combat the Soviets that suddenly had been orphaned by the loss of that enemy and now were adapted to the new cause of antiterrorism.  With the demise of the Soviet navy, which was never much of a threat to U.S. fleets, it became absurd to construct new Virginia-class attack submarines at a cost of between $2.7 and $3.1 billion apiece; but what the heck, it’s only money, and each of the service branches needs its new toys.  Who cares that the terrorists lack submarines for the U.S. Navy to battle deep in the ocean, for which the Virginia-class submarine was designed?

For the Marine Corps, there is Boeing’s V-22 Osprey tilt rotor aircraft that combines the vertical takeoff and landing of a helicopter with the flight pattern of a fixed-wing plane to ferry marines about.  Twenty years in the making, these planes have crashed several times, killing their crews, and production always has been many billions of dollars over budget.  A performance need was never proven, even in the old Cold War days.  Dick Cheney tried to deep-six the Osprey when he was secretary of defense back in 1991, but Congress overruled him, and it continues to this day as a program expected to cost $50 billion.

The spending spree that followed 9/11 was uncontrollable, but the question is, was it worth it?  Did the expenditure of trillions of additional taxpayer dollars, including the long-run costs of the Iraq occupation, in addition to the more than $300 billion a year that already was being spent on the Pentagon before 9/11, have anything to do with preventing another such attack?  Did it improve U.S. security?

Steve Kosiak of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, explained the dynamics of post 9/11 defense funding: "Both the administration and the armed services have incentive to put things in the [budget] requests for GWOT funding, whether it is related to war or not.  It sounds better politically; it has that emergency ring to it.  If you can attach something to a bill that deals with troop pay and armor, it will have smoother sailing."

Since President Bush cut taxes rather than raise them, the escalating costs of his war will be borne by taxpayers well into the future, and the trillions wasted on a swollen military budget, barely noticed at the time, will be the source of much soul searching as we raise taxes and cut needed programs in order to service a debt that never should have been incurred.