Juan Cole: Dick Cheney Broke US Military, Now Blames Obama for Cuts

[Octafish]

Dick Cheney Broke US Military, Now Blames Obama for Cuts

By Juan Cole
TruthDig.org, Feb 27, 2014

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has lambasted the Obama administration for its announcement that it will cut 8% out of the military budget and reduce standing army troop levels to the lowest level since before World War II (from 550,000 at the height of the Iraq War to 440,000). Cheney told CNN he believed that Obama would rather spend the money on food stamps than on the military.

Cheney himself, however, is one of the reasons for these cuts.

According to former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, Cheney is the one who insisted on two big tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans in the first years of the Bush administration, which has been a structural contributor to persistent budget deficits. America has become an extremely unequal society, with the top 1% taking home 20% of the national income every month, and obviously if they pay dramatically less in Federal taxes, it causes a shortfall that cannot be made up from the 99%. Those deficits provoked the ‘sequester,’ automatic across the board cuts in the government budget, which are among the impetuses for Hagel’s budget.

Cheney also pushed hard for the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, which has already cost $1 trillion, all of which he borrowed and so contributed to the budget crisis and to the difficulties the country had getting out of the 2008 Great Bush Depression. The care for the tens of thousands of wounded veterans will over the decades likely cost the government another two or three trillion.

Given that Cheney helped prosecute a naked act of aggression on false pretenses, he is a war criminal and ideally should be prosecuted and jailed rather than being given a megaphone in corporate media to continue to push for militarism.

CONTINUED w/links...

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/dick_cheney_broke_us_military_now_blames_obama_for_cuts_20140227

With Smiling Dick Cheney, the hypocrisy never ends.

[MADem]

1. Cheney is a criminal and an asshole. But, most of all, he is STUPID.

The bottom line, though, is this--we can cut the military WAY down, and still be far more prepared for any contingency than we were in "Pre-WW2" days. Why? Because we have outsourced a lot of bullshit jobs that used to be the province of junior enlisted. Now, we don't make a young soldier or sailor cut the grass or paint walls, we hire people to do that shit. We don't have massive staffs of uniformed people waiting on senior wives, polishing the general's silver, etc., those billets are trimmed down and highly regulated. Military people aren't running the base bowling alley, movie theater, swimming pools, golf courses, etc--civilians do that, and those amenities are "self sustaining," i.e. fees and sales pay for the civilian salaries.

The service member's job is to get very good at his or her job, and when that job involves projecting power/putting ordnance on target, then that is "bang for the buck." Even with lower numbers, we'll be in a much better readiness posture than we were pre-WW2.

[Octafish]

2. Dick hedged his bets. As SecDef, he led the ''Privatization of War Profits'' through outsourcing.

I agree whole-heartedly with you, MADem. We can cut the military budget and still maintain the world's best military ready and able to defend the nation from all its enemies. Unfortunately, the jobs formerly done by members of the armed forces -- from KP to laying concrete for runway construction -- no longer are done by the cheap labor courtesy of Uncle Sam's enlisted ranks. They're outsourced to the qualified bidder cough Halliburton.

The sun never sets on the Empire. And Empires aren't democracies. And, thus, no matter what We the People say or for whom we vote, the military requires a presence in more than 150-countries around the globe.

Cheney's Multi-Million Dollar Revolving Door

News: As Bush Sr.'s secretary of defense, Dick Cheney steered millions of dollars in government business to a private military contractor -- whose parent company just happened to give him a high-paying job after he left the government.

By Robert Bryce
Mother Jones
August 2, 2000

EXCERPT...

In 1992, the Pentagon, then under Cheney's direction, paid Texas-based Brown & Root Services $3.9 million to produce a classified report detailing how private companies -- like itself -- could help provide logistics for American troops in potential war zones around the world. BRS specializes in such work; from 1962 to 1972, for instance, the company worked in the former South Vietnam building roads, landing strips, harbors, and military bases. Later in 1992, the Pentagon gave the company an additional $5 million to update its report. That same year, BRS won a massive, five-year logistics contract from the US Army Corps of Engineers to work alongside American GIs in places like Zaire, Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, the Balkans, and Saudi Arabia.

After Bill Clinton's election cost Cheney his government job, he wound up in 1995 as CEO of Halliburton Company, the Dallas-based oil services giant -- which just happens to own Brown & Root Services. Since then, Cheney has collected more than $10 million in salary and stock payments from the company. In addition, he is currently the company's largest individual shareholder, holding stock and options worth another $40 million. Those holdings have undoubtedly been made more valuable by the ever-more lucrative contracts BRS continues to score with the Pentagon.

Between 1992 and 1999, the Pentagon paid BRS more than $1.2 billion for its work in trouble spots around the globe. In May of 1999, the US Army Corps of Engineers re-enlisted the company's help in the Balkans, giving it a new five-year contract worth $731 million.

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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2000/08/cheneys-multi-million-dollar-revolving-door

Driving all the military spending: entrenched commercial interests of the few. And that keeps our elected leaders from seeing clearly and acting in the best interests of the nation. The next big thing will be robotics -- replacing divisions of human soldiers with battalions of unpaid drones that never mutiny.

Smart people know what needs to be done and how to do it. The problem lies in the fact that the government no longer operates in service of the voters. It does what's best for the owners. That's why they own and operate players like Dick: He returns on their "investment." Big Time.

[MADem]

3. We don't have to use Halliburton. The people who work on US/permanent bases aren't Halliburton.

They're either appropriated or non-appropriated funds instrumentality workers. They are "govenment employees" with all the perks and duties attending. Most of them, though not all, are double dippers--retirees. Some are ex-military, vets, not retirees, a few are spouses. Now, out in the boondocks, they are contracted, but not at the permanent installations.

Let's get back to that paradigm, even for the temporary facilities. We don't have to hire some assholes to hire clueless, unprepared schmucks without language skills or appropriate experience to do the job; and we do just that in remote locations, like Afghanistan, Bosnia, even Gitmo. We don't need Indonesian guys putting mayo on bread and leaving it in the heat for four hours in Afghanistan, we don't need Jamaican guys getting paid in the dark to work in Gitmo, we don't need contracted Koreans doing scut work in Bosnia. We can hire or re-assign AFI and NAFI people, on five year contracts, and get what we pay for--quality work from quality workers who understand the military culture, because they've either lived it or been married to it. And we need to pay them appropriately. It is possible to "surge" with American assets, not managed by some "contractor," but overseen by military or civilian personnel already wired into the chain of command, and produce a good product. I've seen it done before. Maybe we need to fashion a military "job" that falls under installation management, that trains people to set up and manage this kind of thing. Hell, it's complex enough, given the many jobs we expect these resources to do, to qualify as a check block on a shore command track.

Military personnel aren't cheap, especially when they stay in uniform. The costs start rising when they get married, have kids, and retire. We can cut costs with civilian personnel, but we need quality ones--and quality ones are those who can hit the ground running, with language, work and culture skills to do the job. And it's always helpful to have people who can qualify for a clearance, if needs must.

Didn't Halliburton run offshore? We should also make sure we never hire foreign assets, and that includes those that relocate back to USA --make them pay taxes for ten years or so before they can get a USG contract...that'll fix their little red wagon!

[AAO]

4. He should be dead in prison by now - the evil dick!

[The Wizard]

5. And Big Dick

fails to mention the unaccounted for trillions lost under the Bush cartel. Let's get real here; some people stole trillions and there's no investigation. Eisenhower warned us in 1961.