Word: pentagonal
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...ground forces, stretching those serving in the Army and Marines and wearing out their gear at an unprecedented rate. So, it's no surprise that the nation's ground-pounders would be seeking the most from the ever-cooperative members of the House Armed Services Committee. For years, that Pentagon-pleasing panel has asked the services to send it a wish list - lawmakers prefer to call it an "unfunded requirements list" - of budget items they desire but which have not been approved by their penny-pinching civilian overseers, i.e. the Defense Secretary and the President...
...military is hardly starving. The Pentagon's proposed 2009 Defense Budget is twice the size of the budget President Bush inherited from Bill Clinton. Even without the nearly $200 billion for the wars, the $515 billion tab is on par with the defense budgets of World War II. "Today, free-flowing funding has fundamentally undermined all budget discipline in the Pentagon," says Gordon Adams, who oversaw military spending from a senior post in the Clinton White House...
...Take the fight over the F-22. The Pentagon has declared it wants to cap procurement at 183 planes, for $65 billion. But the Air Force wants 380 of them. "We think that [183] is the wrong number," General Bruce Carlson, the Air Force's top weapons buyer, told reporters at a Feb. 13 industry gathering. "We're committed to funding 380," he added. "We're building a program right now to do that." Defense Secretary Robert Gates called Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne after reading Carlson's comments in Aerospace Daily, a trade paper, and told him to remind...
...workers in 44 states building the F-22 - the prime contractor is aerospace giant Lockheed Martin - and their allies in Congress. That is what is so insidious about these lists: once Congress gets a hold of them, they're used as pile drivers to pound extra billions into the Pentagon budget, generally by lawmakers seeking to fund jobs in their districts...
...some, such reforms come too late. Cassidy's death was the first in a string of at least three that led to urgent meetings at the Pentagon earlier this month on how to prevent them. They included soldiers who died in late January at WTUS in New York and Texas. Lieut. General Eric Schoomaker, the Army's top doctor, told TIME that easy access to drugs and lack of accountability played key roles in Cassidy's death. "If there's any good to come of this at all," Schoomaker said, "it's that we will work as hard...