I appreciate the Sunday Globe article “Some fear budget deal will reopen Pentagon spigot” (Page A1, Jan. 5) as a way to highlight the powerful forces at play that keep the Pentagon budget so bloated. Does defense REALLY need the $21 billion voted back into the military budget for 2014?
At roughly $550 billion per year, the US military spends more than the world’s next 11 largest military budgets combined. Cost overruns for highly sophisticated weapons systems are built into the procurement process for weapons that are seldom, if ever, used, and that are often outdated by the time they are put into service.
In the United States, one in five children live in poverty, the homeless wait years for subsidized housing, and our world ranking for quality education keeps falling. Wouldn’t a lot of this defense money be better spent on these domestic issues?