Word: budgeted
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Capitol Hill, a chorus of voices warns that the Pentagon will be lucky to get even that much. Many members of Congress, searching for ways to cut the overall budget deficit, are in no mood to give the military any increase. According to Les Aspin, the Wisconsin Democrat who heads the House Armed Services Committee, the slash in Pentagon budget authority over the next five years is likely to be "closer to $422 billion" than to Carlucci's figures...
Cuts on that scale cannot be carried out by any nickel-and-dime process. The U.S. will have to reassess its commitments around the world, rethinking basic military strategy and the weapons systems needed to carry it out. The $300 billion budget for fiscal 1989, now in Senate-House conference, gives only a mild taste of what is ahead. To get within those limits, Carlucci will, among other things, retire a Poseidon ballistic-missile submarine, two Air Force wings (total: 144 planes) and 620 Army helicopters, and scale back the proposed number of men and women in uniform...
Most critics agree with Gordon Adams, director of the Washington-based Defense Budget Project, that these weapons probably can be bought "only at the price of a drastic cut in the size of the U.S. armed forces or a debilitating slash in spending for readiness" (training, ammunition, spare parts). The whole contretemps raises a harrowing but unavoidable question: Can the U.S. afford to pay for the defense it needs -- and just how much does it need anyway? In his best-selling book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Historian Paul Kennedy points out that such dominant nations...
...afford 5.9%" of gross national product, approximately the current rate for national defense. Yet Congress is reflecting a judgment that gargantuan deficits ($147 billion this year) will eventually cripple the economy. They cannot be significantly reduced without a whack at planned military spending, which constitutes 27% of the entire budget...
...years, way down for the next few. In the early Reagan years, reversing a series of deep cuts in the mid-'70s, Congress voted military-spending increases as much as 13% above the rate of inflation; from 1980 to the peak in fiscal year 1985, Pentagon budget authority zoomed from $144 billion to $295 billion. The Pentagon's appetite for deluxe weaponry swallowed up so much of those titanic sums that the buildup failed to achieve some major goals. Overall, it did bring a much needed improvement in U.S. combat strength. But Ronald Reagan's dream of an Army...