Don’t bet on it. There is no slashing. The cuts are not cuts.

The budget changes proposed by Secretary Robert Gates would not reduce the military budget. They would merely create a slight decrease in the rate of the military budget’s annual increase.

Secretary Gates has stated this openly: “To be clear, the task before us is not to reduce the department’s top-line budget. Rather, it is to significantly reduce its excess overhead costs and apply the savings to force structure and modernization.”

It’s important to remember, as well, that any spending changes devised by Secretary of Gates need to be reviewed and approved by Congress. In the past, Congress has responded to efforts to cut military programs (amidst general large increases in military spending) by restoring funding, and swelling pork barrel spending to previously unheard of levels.

We’re seeing headlines about a slash. Expect to see, instead, a swell.

Until recently, however, this sort of redundancy was standard operating procedure in the Department of Defense. In order protect against contractor incompetence, the Pentagon would pay two companies to work on two equivalent versions of the same item, just in case one of the items didn’t work. Although it had the best of intentions, this approach enabled shoddy work to remain profitable. It rewarded incompetence, rather than replacing it. So, under Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the Pentagon has attempted to stop funding for redundant projects.

Unfortunately, many members of Congress are reluctant to go along with these reforms. The reason: Powerful corporations operating in their districts profit greatly from the waste.

Yesterday, Congress had the opportunity to end a wasteful redundant military spending program, but chose instead to continue funding for it. The F-35 fighter aircraft is a single engine plane, but General Electric and Rolls-Royce have sought federal money to supply it with a second engine, just in case.

The extra engine costs billions of dollars in extra manufacturing and design costs. The Pentagon has begged Congress to stop funding for it. So, in an amendment to a military appropriations bill, Chellie Pingree sought to eliminate the spending.

The House of Representative voted to reject her amendment, with 231 votes against and only 193 in favor. It was not a partisan vote. 136 Democrats voted for the amendment to cut waste, but 115 Democrats voted against it. 57 Republicans voted in favor of Pingree’s anti-waste amendment. 116 Republicans voted against it, to continue the waste.

The War Is Making You Poor Act, H.R. 5353, brings together weariness with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with anti-tax sentiment and the hunger for fiscal responsibility.

Rhetorically, the legislation makes clear the link between out of control military waste and the impoverishment of the average American. However, the bill doesn’t demand an end to the wars. It demands an end to military pork barrel spending free-for-all that has been conducted with the wars as a thin justification.

The concept is simple: Require the military budget to pay for the wars. That’s what the military budget is for, after all - all $549 billion dollars of it. As Alan Grayson, the author of the bill points out, that’s far above what all other nations on earth pay for their militaries - combined.

From the start, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been paid for with supplemental requests - as if they’re temporary sources of expenditures. The most recent supplemental was 159 billion dollars. H.R. 5353 would rescind that 159 billion dollars, requiring the Pentagon budget to be cleared of the extraordinary waste that currently characterizes it - airplanes and ships that the Pentagon itself says it doesn’t need or want, for example.

The legislation would then require that 159 billion dollars to be returned to the people. 90 percent of it would be used to eliminate federal income tax on the first $35,000 of every American’s income ($70,000 for a married couple). The remaining amount would reduce 16 billion dollars from the federal budget deficit.

H.R. 5353 is a bipartisan bill, with support from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. So far, though, both Democratic Party and Republican Party leaders don’t seem keen on passing the bill. There’s a lot of pork barrel influence they stand to lose.

Why would one Republican challenge another? Diaz is a particular sort of Republican, with libertarian tendencies. He believes that Representative Cole hasn’t been sufficiently opposed to big government spending. Diaz suggests that, unlike Cole, he would be a strong voice in support to any effort to reduce the size and cost of government. Diaz makes a clear promise, saying, “Currently my plan is simple, vote NO to any bill that increases the size of the government, vote YES to any bill that reduces government reach and cost.”

That promise is one that even Diaz can’t keep. Just a couple of paragraphs later, Diaz states, “A bill might come that seeks to reduce funding for the US Military, and while this bill might save billions it would not be in the interest of the national security to do so, so I would have to vote no.”

Note the categorical decision that if a bill seeks reduction of military funding, it be bad for reduce national security. The underlying presumption is that the government is wasteful in its spending, except for the military, which somehow avoids all such problems.

The inconsistent opposition to government waste exhibited by Hector Diaz is just one example of a core weakness among libertarian organizations, politicians and activists: A selective focus on non-military waste. Libertarians, and their allies in the Tea Party movement, seem to have a certain special fondness for big military spending projects, even those that have been found to be especially corrupt and inefficient.

The truth is that the military budget proposed by Robert Gates for 2010 is an increase from the 2009 budget.

2009 Pentagon budget: $513 billion
Proposed 2010 Pentagon budget: $534 billion

How is an increase of $31 billion in the Pentagon budget categorized as “slashing”?

The truth of the increase in military spending is even worse than these numbers suggest. It’s a comparison between an actual budget and a proposed budget. It is typical for Congress to shove even more spending into the Pentagon budget than what the military has requested. So, by the time this process is done, and we see an actual 2010 budget, the increase in military spending will be much, much larger than $31 billion…

… unless American citizens call their members of Congress and demand that real cuts in military spending take place.

Was this difference due to an innate looseness with military budgets within the Republican ideology? It was tempting to think so, but another explanation is suggested by what happened after the Republicans lost control of the House and Senate in 2006.

A review of earmarks in the 2008 defense appropriations bill found that Republican members of Congress inserted about 304 million dollars in earmarks for military projects that the Pentagon never even asked for. However, Democrats in Congress inserted even more of these unrequested earmarks: 524 million dollars worth.

Military spending did not go down when Democrats took control of Congress. Between 2006 and 2008 - under the direction of congressional Democrats, military spending increased by 10 percent.

It seems that much of the Republican weight of responsibility for wasteful military spending over the last decade has been due to their control of Congress. The Democrats cannot be fairly described as having an inherent superiority in resistance to military waste. The taste for military pork barrel seems to be sadly bipartisan in nature.

“The Taliban doesn’t have an air force. China and Russia are at least a generation behind us. So at a time when we’re talking about developing unmanned aerial vehicles and want to increase our special forces, we ought to be making a clean sweep of these systems that were built during the Cold War.” - William Hartung, New America Foundation

That’s a problem, because the Littoral Combat Ship has been an example of military spending gone out of control. The first Littoral Combat Ship to be completed, the Freedom, was supposed to cost $220 million dollars. It actually cost more than twice that amount.

Were lessons learned from that disaster? No. The second Littoral Combat Ship to be called the Independence, is now almost complete, and it will cost us even more. Its price is projected to be above $600 million dollars.

Why is Secretary Gates rewarding incompetence and waste in military contracting?

The method of Magliocchetti’s persuasion, it seems, was to funnel campaign donations to members of Congress. That’s not the way the system of lobbying is supposed to work. It’s illegal. It’s called corruption.

Yet, as an excellent series about Paul Magliocchetti’s schemes shows, corruption has shaped the way that the U.S. military is structured, and the way that it operates in the field of combat. It isn’t just money that’s been lost because of the corruption that runs through the military contracting system. American lives have been sold out as well.

This isn’t the first time the F-22 has spontaneously crashed and burned. Just a few years ago, all F-22s were grounded after a similar crash.

It is a curious thing that an Associated Press article about this crash calls the F-22 “the Air Force’s new top-of-the-line fighter.” The F-22 is actually an old and historically troublesome airplane.

The F-22 design is based on studies begun in the last 1970s. 16 years after the project to develop the F-22 was approved, the F-22 still had 165 separate design problems that had not been overcome.

The only thing the F-22 has been successful in is building political connections. F-22 construction brings pork barrel money into the districts of many influential members of Congress. So, no matter how matter how many times the old bird crashes and burns, Congress seems determined to try to resurrect it from the flames.