The United States has stepped closer to a total ban on the use and export of cluster bombs with the signing by Barack Obama of a new permanent law that would make it almost impossible for the US to sell the controversial weapons.
The decision was hailed by opponents of the weapons as a "major turnaround in US policy" that overrode Pentagon calls to permit their continued export.
"As the administration and Congress look to fund defense projects for 2010, we would be remiss to forget about the importance of missile defense," Griffith said. "According to the president's outline, the Department of Defense will have $533.7 billion for its base budget for 2010, which is a four percent increase from 2009 funding. While this is a moderate increase, we must keep in mind that we are spending billions of that increase on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."
The hollow defense budgets, peace dividends and the procurement holiday that marked the Clinton administration's defense policy appear to be making a comeback.
The message hidden between the lines of the 2010 Defense Department budget released last week is that defense spending will decline in the coming years and that the military will be forced to do more with less. We've been down this road before; we cannot repeat the same mistakes.
"One thing we have known for many months is that the spigot of defense funding that opened on 9/11 is closing," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee in January.
When President Obama promised Wednesday to attack defense spending that he considers wasteful and inefficient, he opened a fight with key lawmakers from his own party.
It was Democrats who stuffed an estimated $524 million in defense earmarks that the Pentagon did not request into the 2008 appropriations bill, about $220 million more than Republicans did, according to an independent estimate. Of the 44 senators who implored Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in January to build more F-22 Raptors -- a fighter conceived during the Cold War that senior Pentagon officials say is not suited to probable 21st-century conflicts -- most were Democrats.
Subjects the two would discuss on Tuesday include Sudan, which has expelled 13 aid agencies after President Omar Hassan al-Bashir was charged with war crimes in Darfur by the International Criminal Court, Ambassador Susan Rice said.
They would also talk about efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, the global economic crisis, U.N. reform, climate change and U.N. peacekeeping operations, Rice said in a statement.
