Since the beginning of the year, news has been pouring in from the United States that the Pentagon's budget is undergoing severe cuts, as President Obama has recently announced. Thus, the US Budget Conciliation Commission has published materials on overcoming disagreements over the curtailment or revision of certain military programs. Apparently, Mr. Panetta may miss several tens of billions of dollars in the budget of his department in the near future. Or are all these cuts just bait for the public?
In Congress, when adopting numerous amendments to the military budget, they are trying to come to a consensus: whether this sequestration will affect the security of the United States. Of course, there are enough congressmen who see direct intervention of foreign intelligence services in attempts to cut military spending in order to "take America with their bare hands." As we know, the United States has always had enough of its own witch hunters, so there is no reason to hope that the budgetary "circumcision" will pass quietly and peacefully.
Meanwhile, in the plans of the ideological inspirers of reducing the state debt and, accordingly, military spending, there is something like the following.
First of all, the Pentagon will have to stop sponsoring obsolete and ineffective projects and programs. These programs include several programs to re-equip the US Navy, modernize command posts both inside and outside the United States, refusal to purchase F-22 fighters, and projects to create a range of new weapons.
At the same time, the Americans decide to focus on high-tech areas of military production. In particular, we are talking about the beginning of the operation of a communication satellite operating at ultrahigh frequencies. This, in the opinion of the Americans, should make their communication channels absolutely closed for the interception of information from the outside. For some reason, the possibility of an internal leak that has existed at all times is not being considered … In addition, plans are being considered to create a completely new bomber - LRPB, which will have stealth technology and have a long range.
Increased focus will be on cyber security compliance. In this regard, the Americans are bluntly stating that not all is well with cybersecurity in the United States lately. The main culprit in Washington is the People's Republic of China. The report states that in recent years, the number of cyberattacks on the Pentagon's computer systems by hackers from the Middle Kingdom has reached unprecedented proportions. At the same time, the Congress and the White House are accusing the names of the official authorities of Beijing, which, according to the American authorities, are deliberately organizing and financing such attacks in order to seize confidential information contained on the Pentagon's servers. One might think that the Americans themselves do not practice virus attacks on servers with military data in other countries …
In addition, now the Pentagon has been given urgent recommendations to carefully check those electronic components that come from abroad as part of the concluded contracts. The Senate Committee on the US Armed Forces states that during 2010-11, the number of unlicensed and frankly low-quality components from China intended for American military equipment amounted to no less than a million units. Now even those components that are supplied from the territory of the main American allies, Canada and Great Britain, will be carefully checked by experts, since the same committee has information that the allies are openly cheating, "slipping" "Made in China" components to NATO partners, trying keep silent about the country of origin of this kind of electronics.
The Americans did not forget to touch upon the nuclear program. At the same time, overly optimistic people have already begun to draw in plans when the United States will suddenly decide to stop in its further production of missiles with nuclear warheads, but the United States is going to go the other way. As a reduction in the military budget, it is planned to suspend the financing of the Russian-American START project (2011-2017). They say that US citizens need guarantees that if the treaty is implemented, then their (citizens') safety will not be under threat. There will be no funding until Congress receives "exhaustive" information on the full-scale modernization of existing capabilities. But he may never receive such information - purposefully. This means that purposefully build up nuclear power "in one person."
In this regard, one can only notice that for some time now any agreements like START between Washington and Moscow have lost all meaning. There is an obvious imposition of decisions on the Russian side and systematic disregard of the clauses of such treaties by the American side. Now a new argument may appear for this: they say, we simply do not have money to reduce the strategic nuclear forces - we are sequestering everything in a row here anyway …
But at the same time, an amendment appeared in the bill, which says that the White House can calmly continue to deploy European missile defense, regardless of what other countries think about it. And here, you know, no cuts are expected …
Regarding the financing of the personnel, here too the congressmen cut everything in a strange way. At first, it was about the fact that it would be possible to save money on the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, but then, having brought together, as they say, the balances, it turned out that spending on financing the personnel did not even decrease, but increased. It's just that at the first stage of the discussion it was about the active military personnel, and the United States has more than 1 million 422 thousand "bayonets", and then they remembered that there are also almost 850 thousand reservists who are also needed, whether or not you want, to finance. It turned out that we had to allocate $ 4.4 billion more than last year.
I had to look for the possibility of cutting the military budget in other places. We found it possible to reduce funding for combat training of personnel by $ 7.7 billion. Apparently, the American parliamentarians decided that with something, and with the combat training of the US Army personnel, everything is in order. The congressmen found another way to save money by adopting a project to reduce funding for government anti-terrorist programs in countries such as the aforementioned Iraq and Afghanistan. Here, too, everything is clear. It's somehow worthless to give money to Karzai to continue "exterminating the Taliban" and at the same time to negotiate with the Taliban themselves …
After long and tedious calculations, it turned out that the base budget for the year will amount to $ 662 billion according to some data, and according to others - "only" $ 618 billion. Apparently, the calculations with a spread of fifty billion "back and forth" do not really bother Congress. The main thing is that the smart word "sequestration" has been sounded to calm the world community. And how to cut it down so that it only increases, Congress knows, and even more so, Mr. Panetta.
