Dartmouth 2K9 Possible 2nc – Clash Drill Money would go to the Airborne Laser sfc 10

But the Obama administration has put the Airborne Laser Test Bed on hold, turning it into an experimental project instead of buying additional systems from its three main contractors: Lockheed, which created the aiming system, Northrop Grumman, developer of the laser, and Boeing, which packaged the weapons system in a special airplane. Job losses As a result, a project that had employed 350 Lockheed workers at its peak in 2000, and roughly 200 employees before Obama, now has a staff of 110. "By the end of the year we'll be at 60 people," said Douglas Graham, a vice president at the Lockheed division running the program. "The fate of the airborne laser is somewhat emblematic of how the Pentagon views California and Silicon Valley as sources for science-based systems," said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst with the Lexington Institute, a think tank in Washington. Thompson said defense planners want high-tech contractors to keep generating ideas, but with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq sapping the defense budget, costly weapons like the airborne laser may not get deployed.

White House Budget Director Peter R. Orszag rejected the notion that defense was asked to absorb a disproportionate share of the cuts. "Defense spending will increase by 4 percent in 2010," Mr. Orszag said. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, whom Mr. Obama retained from President Bush's Cabinet, "has said the defense budget needs reform," Mr. Orszag added.

To fight new threats from insurgents, Gates is proposing more funding for special forces and other tools. Kudos to the AP for that last line, but nowhere does the article mention that the defense budget is increasing. Whether you agree with the increase or not, that's what's happening. Not a cut. We'll keep our eye out for more examples of this sort of thing--the media is pretty well trained to paint anything other than major spending increases on the same old Pentagon programs as "budget cuts". So it could be a busy day.

After the Cold War, Clinton cut the defense budget despite the prosecution of many frivolous small wars that were unneeded for U.S. security. So far, Obama continues to increase military spending while freezing only a small part of non-security spending. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, has prudently said the avoidance of cutting security spending is unacceptable. And security spending is massive. According to Winslow Wheeler of the Center on Defense Information, the annual U.S. security budget—including spending on the wars, the Defense Department, the Department of Energy nuclear weapons programs, homeland security, veterans compensation, international affairs, non-DoD military retirement payments, and interest on the national debt accounted for by defense programs—is well over $1 trillion per year. Cuts to such spending should not entail just slashing a few weapon systems—as was done in FY 2010 but not in FY 2011—but need to result from a total reassessment of the non-traditional post-World War II U.S. foreign policy of U.S. militarized interventionism. Such a policy should have been pronounced a failure when it caused the horrendous retaliatory terrorist attacks on 9/11. Instead, the tragedy triggered the initiation of a neoconservative hyper-version of this same foreign policy, the War on Terror (which includes two unneeded and counterproductive occupations of two Muslim countries), which statistics show made the problem of terrorism worse.

On the other end, a number of pro-military Democrats -- particularly those on the Armed Services committees -- are not expected to push as hard for cuts to defense while the nation is still fighting wars. But Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, an Army veteran and member of both the Armed Services and Appropriations committees, may be receptive to cutting deals instead of budgets. McCain, the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, has aligned with the chairman to co-sponsor an acquisition reform bill.... But don't take that to mean McCain wants to cut to the bone. He remains an advocate for robust defense spending.

However, the history of high-power military lasers is littered with embarrassing failures in which too much was promised, and false expectations were created a decade ago during the early "Star Wars" program. So critics say it is too early to tell whether the new system, known as the airborne laser, will work any better. They caution that building the device will involve major technical hurdles. But senior defense officials insist that the story will be different this time because the technology is in hand and the need for a weapon to protect American troops is rooted in a visceral memory of Iraq's deadly Scud attack against a U.S. barracks during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The aerospace industry smells big business in the future of lasers, foreseeing the day when such weapons are used for all kinds of battlefield shooting matches.

Rumsfeld’s transformation in U.S. military space policy is driven by worst-case assumptions that the weaponization of space is inevitable; that conflict follows commerce in space, as on the ground; and that the United States must not wait to suffer a “Space Pearl Harbor.”[3] Yet, the countries most capable of developing such weapons, such as Russia and China, have professed strong interest in avoiding the weaponization of space. The Bush administration has refused negotiations on this subject. If Rumsfeld’s plans to weaponize space are carried to fruition, America’s armed forces, economy, and diplomacy will face far greater burdens, while controls over proliferation would be weakened further. Although everybody loses if the heavens become a shooting gallery, no nation loses more than the United States, which is the primary beneficiary of satellites for military and commercial purposes. If the United States leads the way in flight-testing and deploying new anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons, other states will surely follow suit because they have too much to lose by allowing the Pentagon sole rights to space warfare. U.S. programs will cost more and be far more sophisticated than the ASAT weapons of potential adversaries, who will opt to kill satellites cheaply and crudely. The resulting competition would endanger U.S. troops that depend on satellites to an unprecedented degree for battlefield intelligence, communication, and targeting to win quickly and with a minimum of casualties.