Prestige Weapons Systems are Busting the Pentagon’s Budget
Angry Planet
Matthew Gault
4.3 • 882 Ratings
🗓️ 16 January 2018
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Pentagon always wants more money and it usually gets its way. Between sequestration and the War on Terror, America’s military often feels like it’s stretched thin. The Navy says it needs more sailors to prevent disaster, U.S. nukes need upkeep to stay safe, and the Special Operations Forces need more and more support to do their job.
Yet the American military outspends every other major military power on the planet and watch dogs constantly complain of waste, fraud, and abuse at the Pentagon. What’s going on? Here to help us sort it out is one of the watchdogs, former Marine Corps officer and current Project on Government Oversight employee Dan Grazier.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Love this podcast. |
| 0:02.0 | Support this show through the A-Cast supporter feature. |
| 0:05.0 | It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. |
| 0:09.0 | Just click the link in the show description to support now. |
| 0:20.0 | In the popular mind we think that the big Reagan buildup in the 1980s was the pinnacle of Pentagon spending with the exclusion of the World War two years. |
| 0:25.9 | But in reality in the last 15 years, that's when we've really reached our peak, with the peak |
| 0:30.2 | being in 2011 when when just Pentagon spending peaked at approximately 711 |
| 0:39.0 | billion dollars that year. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. |
| 0:55.0 | Here are your hosts, Matthew am your host Matthew Gold. |
| 1:03.0 | Jason Fields is here in spirit if not in the digital flash. |
| 1:17.0 | Last week we spoke to David Daptula, Dean of Mitchell Institute of Aerospace Power Studies and Retired Air Force Lieutenant General. |
| 1:24.6 | He walked us through the purpose and power of the B21. |
| 1:28.3 | During that conversation, we had a long aside about the Pentagon budget. |
| 1:31.1 | It was a good talk and a point of view you don't normally hear on this show, but we didn't want it to stand alone and we didn't want it to go unchallenged. |
| 1:38.9 | So today's show is a bit of an odd mix. We're going to open with Daptula's thoughts on the Pentagon's budget and dove |
| 1:44.7 | that into a conversation with former Marine Corps captain and current government watchdog, |
| 1:50.4 | Dan Grature. But first, here'Eptula talking about the budget. |
| 1:59.6 | Can you explain briefly what you mean by constrained resources because all we're |
| 2:06.6 | hearing about and by the way I'm not taking any sort of stance whatsoever. |
| 2:12.3 | We keep hearing about this desire to increase the defense |
| 2:15.4 | budget by something like $65 billion and I know there's a lot of talk about how the |
| 2:20.0 | figures are sliding all over the place and it may already be money that had been supposed to go to defense. |
... |
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