Dartmouth 2K9 Possible 2ac cards Gates see extreme spending – will cut now Presstv 5/8

7/9/2007 CRS Report For Congress“Airborne Laser (ABL): Issues for Congress” http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RL32123.pdf

The first details about what is happening inside one of the biggest programs marked for cancellation by Defense Secretary Gates are beginning to filter out. In the days after Gates announced its planned demise, Boeing and Lockheed Martin went through what may well be the last design reviews for the Transformational Satellite program. A source familiar with the program told us that the attitude during the reviews was pretty “fatalistic,” which would certainly not be in keeping with the approach many contractors are going to take to programs targeted by Gates. While some in industry talk about the secretary’s speech last week helping things by clearing the air or introducing more stability into the fevered atmosphere surrounding the defense industry the last month or so, many defense industr6y types have been loading up for bear, preparing detailed lobbying campaigns and community outreach. But the Boeing and Lockheed teams were apparently resigned to the end of their program.

The Obama administration has pressured House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense Chairman John Murtha (D-Pa.) and Senate Appropriations Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) not to add programs to the budget — and defense contractors are going to have a harder time getting lawmakers to reinstate programs, according to defense analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute. “A sea change is upon us in the way money is appropriated in terms of military programs,” Thompson said. “In general it is going to be difficult for Democratic appropriators to disagree with a Democratic president on whether weapons should be added when the country is facing a huge budget deficit,” he added. The Obama administration has also vowed that this will be the last wartime supplemental spending bill, and that future spending for conflicts abroad will go through the regular Defense appropriations bill. The supplementals have been magnets for additional defense spending in years past.

Speaking before a national Veterans of Foreign Wars convention Monday in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S. President Barack Obama had sharp words for members of Congress. “If Congress sends me a defense bill loaded with a bunch of pork, I will veto it.” Obama’s warning comes after the House approved in late July by a vote of 400-30 a $636 billion Pentagon spending bill, as the Pentagon executes an obstacle-laden withdrawal from Iraq while shifting U.S. military might to Afghanistan. Obama’s reasons for moderating the defense budget are many. To name a few, record levels of government spending to combat the financial crisis and stimulate the recession economy has diminished the government’s stores of financial flexibility, stores which it must ration ever more scrupulously to achieve the Obama administration’s ambitious agenda – a public healthcare option, alternative energy entrepreneurship, and an expanded diplomatic corps. Most significantly for the Pentagon, a long-standing call for reforming defense spending, contracting and procurement, most recently espoused by Defense Secretary Robert Gates in Foreign Affairs magazine, is also motivating Obama’s stern message. The administration’s success or failure in achieving the defense spending reforms it seeks will profoundly affect not only the Iraq and Afghan wars, but also the future of U.S. military policy.

This is a test the MDA was hoping to conduct in 2002, after spending about a billion dollars. But the Airborne Laser ran into all kinds of problems along the way. The chemicals the jet depended on to generate its high-strength laser weighed down the 747. Getting the laser to accurately zap through the atmosphere proved tougher than anticipated. The Airborne Laser eventually ballooned into a $7.3 billion project. Finally, Defense Secretary Robert Gates got so fed up, he told the MDA to end the Airborne Laser program after a single jet. “I don’t know anybody at the Department of Defense who thinks that this program should, or would, ever be operationally deployed,” Gates told Congress last year. “The reality is that you would need a laser something like 20 to 30 times more powerful than the chemical laser in the plane right now to be able to get any distance from the launch site to fire.” So, right now the [jet] would have to orbit inside the borders of Iran in order to be able to try and use its laser to shoot down that missile in the boost phase. And if you were to operationalize this you would be looking at 10 to 20 747s, at a billion-and-a-half dollars apiece, and $100 million a year to operate. And there’s nobody in uniform that I know who believes that this is a workable concept.

On the other hand, the pouring of money into military R&D (the Pentagon has spent more than $85bn in 2009), and the corporate profits to be made in the development and deployment of the resulting technologies, have been significant factors in the ever larger numbers of technical facilities on foreign soil. These include such things as missile early-warning radar, signals intelligence, satellite control and space-tracking telescopes. The will to gain military control of space, as well as gather intelligence, has led to the establishment of numerous new military bases in violation of arms-control agreements such as the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. In Colombia and Peru, and in secret and mobile locations elsewhere in Latin America, radar stations are primarily used for anti-trafficking operations.