Challenging Pentagon politics
WITH ALL the media focus on the Iraq war and budget deficits in Washington, it's remarkable that political candidates across the country are barely talking about the problems at the government agency that consumes most of our tax dollars: the Defense Department.
Even though candidates have no problem accusing each other of wasting tax money, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans apparently see any advantage in pointing out that our nation's defense bureaucracy is wasting tens of billions of dollars annually on obsolete Cold War fighter jets, submarines, and more.
It's not as if the Pentagon's misplaced priorities are a secret. You couldn't find a politician in Washington who would not agree that billions are wasted by the Pentagon.
Clearly, it's too late to expect any change on the part of the major parties during this election, but there's actually some hope that the Pentagon-spending dynamic may emerge differently in the next Congress and beyond.
The reasons? The increasing unpopularity of the Iraq war, coupled with the budget deficit.
Currently, few are connecting the mistakes relating to the Iraq war to wasting billions of dollars on stealth fighter jets, sophisticated ships, and other high-tech weapons that have little or no use against our modern threats, such as terrorists.
But it's possible that as congressional momentum builds against the Iraq war, more in Congress will ask tough questions about the Pentagon budget.
There are two primary reasons why this might happen. First, one of the major reasons political leaders refrain from critiquing Pentagon spending is because they don't want to be accused of being "weak on defense" or not supportive of the troops. They worry that a vote against any item in the regular Pentagon budget (as opposed to the supplemental budget, which funds the war), even if it's a vote to save billions of tax dollars wasted on a fighter jet that has no military utility, will turn up in a political attack advertisement in the next election.
But in an environment in which the Pentagon's civilian leadership is under widespread and mainstream attack in Congress for mismanaging the Iraq war, the door is open for other demons in the Pentagon closet to be exposed.
And clearly, if the public image of the Pentagon becomes tarnished and more of its political leaders viewed as inept, members of Congress are more likely to realize that they can get away with questioning the Pentagon on budgetary priorities as well as Iraq.
As the Pentagon and its civilian leaders are criticized more widely, the budget deficit will only get worse next year.
And, as any federal budget expert will tell you, there's no other agency in the federal government that carries as much unnecessary spending than the Pentagon.
The Defense Department has been spared the budget knife for so many years and, thus, it's been the go-to repository for unconscionable wasteful programs, some of which have nothing whatsoever to do with defense and everything to do with politics and defense contractor lobbyists. For example, in the recently enacted defense budget there were 2,800 earmarks worth $11 billion.
The Pentagon has been the Beltway's sacred cow, while virtually all other areas of congressional discretionary spending have been pared down.
So, ironically, despite the election-season silence about the Pentagon, there's real hope on the horizon thanks to the Iraq war and the federal budget crunch.
And given the explosive potential of both these issues next year, it's not wishful thinking to expect the tide to turn against the current policy in Iraq as well as against unnecessary Pentagon spending with surprising speed. And this would be by far the best result to emerge from the Iraq disaster and the budget crisis.
Lawrence J. Korb, former assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan, is on the military advisory board of Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities. 
