I watched the Leher report last night. Lots of discussion about a lot
of things I can't remember now, but nothing about this.
My only prior awareness of it came from reading Tom Kruse's Pen-l554
message. The following report is from the English Electronic Telegraph
www://telegraph.co.uk
Frank
US boosts defence spending by
£165bn
By Hugo Gurdon in Washington
Other nations will come under
pressure to
follow Pentagon
AMERICA began its biggest peacetime
military
build-up since 1985 yesterday after
President Clinton
and Congress agreed to increase its
defence budget
by 10 per cent to $280 billion (£165bn).
The turn-round after years of cuts will
include a
doubling of spending on missile defence.
It was
welcomed by critics who believe that
Washington has
for too long spent "the peace dividend" on
civilian
programmes while turning a blind eye to
national
security threats left behind by the
collapse of
communism. The Joint Chiefs of Staff
recently
complained that the country was $15
billion short of
appropriate defence spending.
The switch from cuts to extra spending,
comes amid
mounting concern that American
capabilities have
dwindled dangerously, leaving the country
ill-prepared to meet dangers posed by
rogue states,
weapons proliferation and rising
instability in the
post-Cold War era.
In the $1.7 trillion (£1 trillion) overall
1999 budget
settled on Thursday, Republican
negotiators secured
an extra $9 billion of military spending
on top of the
$270.5 billion agreed in negotiations with
the White
House a month ago, which would have
increased
defence spending by less that six per
cent.
Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the House of
Representatives, who once complained that
military
cuts meant that the Pentagon, the Defence
Department's five-sided building in
Virginia, should
become the Triangle, welcomed the
agreement to
reverse the armed forces' recent decline.
He said:
"This is the first time since 1985 that in
peacetime we
have increased defence spending, because
our young
men and women in uniform deserve the
support of
the United States of America." Defence
spending rose
in 1991 to finance the Gulf war.
Republicans want annual military spending
boosted
quickly above $300 billion. President
Reagan's build
up, which is now credited by many with
winning the
Cold War, reached its peak in 1985, when
he spent
$287 billion, which after adjusting for
inflation is
equivalent to $485 billion today.
Of the extra money agreed on Thursday, $1
billion
will be used to more than double research
on a
missile defence shield, a scaled down
version of
Ronald Reagan's Star Wars project. North
Korea,
Iran, Pakistan and India are acquiring
sophisticated
ballistic systems, and Iraq is not thought
to have
abandoned its hopes either. India's Agni
missiles are
extending their range beyond 1,250 miles,
and Iran's
Shahab-3 will have a range of 1,000 miles
or more.
North Korea's Taepo Dong-2 missile, with a
range of
over 3,700 miles, will allow the unstable
Stalinist
tyranny in Pyongyang to hit Hawaii or
Alaska. It is
thought the Koreans are also working on a
missile
which could hit Los Angeles and a vast
stretch of
America west of the Rocky Mountains. US
intelligence services tracked debris from
North
Korea's failed satellite launch last month
for 4,000
miles into the Pacific.
"It underscored a major intelligence
failure in terms
of what is going on in the world about
growing
missile threats," Curt Weldon, a
Republican
congressman, said of Korea's weapons
programme.
North Korea's new range impressed on
Washington
the need for missile defence because it
underlined the
ability of rogue states to acquire
sophisticated
ballistic systems despite international
agreements
designed to prevent them from doing so.
A $2 billion slice of the extra defence
spending will go
to the Central Intelligence Agency,
National Security
Agency and other intelligence departments
to repair
their threadbare espionage networks.
Washington
was caught completely off guard when India
conducted nuclear tests in May.
