US hawks rally to defend defense

from Asia Times:



US hawks rally to defend defense
By Jim Lobe


WASHINGTON - While Iran, Russia, and China are all pretty scary, the ominous word "sequestration" is what is keeping right-wing hawks and their friends in the defense industry up at night. After rallying their forces for most of the past year, their campaign to avoid the "specter of sequestration", as they often refer to it, shifted into high gear on Capitol Hill this past week, as top industry executives were summoned to testify to the urgency of the threat.

At stake could be as much as US$600 billion in Pentagon funding - much of which would presumably be spent on lucrative procurement contracts for new weapons systems - over the next 10 years, as well as what the hawks see as the further erosion of US global military dominance.

"It is clear that if the process of sequestration is fully implemented," warned three of the right's most hawkish think tanks the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Heritage Foundation, and the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) in a joint statement entitled "Defending Defense" last week, "the US military will lack adequate resources to defend the United States and its global interests".

"The specter of sequestration threatens the US defense industrial base at a time when China, Russia, and other military competitors are ramping up their defense industries," according to the statement, which helped raise the curtain on this week's mantra from the military-industrial complex: hundreds of thousands of workers could lose their jobs as early as October one month before the election unless the sequestration nightmare goes away. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/NG21Dj10.html