Time to get answers on defense budget

HARDLY A day passes without one general or another complaining about how the US military is stretched to the breaking point. How this can be when only about 200,000 troops are deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, where they are engaged in relatively low-intensity combat?

Even considering the in-country support contractors and mercenaries provided by companies like Halliburton and Blackwater, total US commitment to these war zones is substantially less than the 536,000 troops we had in Vietnam in 1968.

Yet in 1968 the defense budget, in fiscal 2009 dollars, was around $400 billion, compared to the fiscal 2009 budget request by the president, including supplemental appropriations, of more than $585 billion.

And in 1968, while persecuting the Vietnam War, the United States was also engaged in a Cold War with the Soviet Union.

So how can it cost 30 percent more to field a smaller military against a lesser threat? Could it have something to do with the consolidation of the aerospace and defense industry?

Whatever the reason, the American people have a right to expect their representatives in Congress to start asking some hard questions of the White House and the press to address the same questions to the presidential candidates. We all want an adequate national defense, but the current situation simply does not pass the smell test.

LEO J. COTNOIR
Manchester, N.H.