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.
For all of his lavish new spending plans, President Obama is making one major exception: defense. His fiscal 2010 budget telegraphs that Pentagon spending is going to be under pressure in the years going forward.
The White House proposes to spend $533.7 billion on the Pentagon, a 4% increase over 2009. Include spending on Iraq and Afghanistan, which would be another $130 billion (or a total of $664 billion), and overall defense spending would be around 4.2% of GDP, the same as 2007.
The 14.9 percent increase in defense spending is the lowest in three years, a possible reflection of shifting priorities amid plans for a 4 trillion yuan ($586 billion) stimulus package and a 850 billion yuan ($124 billion) spending boost to expand and revamp an inadequate health care system.
http://www.instantnews.net/chinas-defence-spending-to-touch-70-billion-in-2009.aspxThe Obama defense budget is neither the disastrous downturn that most analysts predicted, nor the boost the administration claims. What it is, though, is plenty worrisome. The president is fond of saying that we need to make long-term "investments" in worthy national goals. Well, his defense budget is no such investment in our national defense.
While the administration is certainly funding short-term military needs, it appears willing to sacrifice long-term U.S. military superiority. We should not forget that, even if China's GDP is no longer growing at 8-9 percent each year, even a five percent annual growth will enable Beijing to continue to modernize and expand its military capability over the medium to long term, while the current U.S. defense budget clearly limits our capability over the same time frame.
Shares of aerospace and defense companies fell along with the broader market Monday as a Goldman Sachs analyst predicted defense spending will peak next year, but another analyst recommended investors buy shares of Lockheed Martin Corp. as fears of reduced U.S. military contracts are overblown.
Shares of the Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed Martin have dropped 23 percent from Feb. 21 to Feb. 27. Analyst Peter Arment of Broadpoint AmTech said the decline was based on concerns that President Barack Obama will cut defense spending.
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JUST SAW YOU ON NEWS CHANNEL 8, TWO MINUTES AGO :)
AND ACTRESS DARRYL HANNAH. ON THE COAL BURNING ISSUE!
WASHINGTON — More than 2,000 clean-energy activists converged at a coal-fired power plant on Capitol Hill on Monday for a protest they billed as the largest display of civil disobedience on the climate crisis in U.S. history.
Willing to be arrested for their cause, they encircled and blocked entrances to the plant, which powers the U.S. Capitol and House and Senate office buildings.
But this particular plant may be the least of the protesters' worries.
Less than a week before the rally, congressional leaders requested the plant's full conversion to natural gas. Organizers were taking credit.
"There are no gifts in this world," said Vermont author and environmentalist Bill McKibben told a cheering crowd. "There is only organizing and movements and people doing what it takes to make change happen and that's what we're doing."
http:// www .usatoday.com/ tech /science/environment/2009-03-02-global-warming-protest_N.htm
NICHOLAS
The stocks of companies in the S&P 500 aerospace and defense index fell Friday after President Barack Obama promised to pull out all of the U.S. combat troops from Iraq by August 2010. The S&P 500 aerospace and defense index fell 3.7 percent to 215.54. That's down more than the S&P 500, which declined 2.4 percent.
They have projected—you know, we are now—according to the Bush budget, we're going to spend billions of dollars to protect the Czech Republic from being attacked by Iran. Now, I'm not a regular reader of the fatwas...
In the midst of an economic crisis that's getting scarier by the day, it's time to ask whether the nation can really afford some 1,000 military bases overseas. For those unfamiliar with the issue, you read that number correctly. One thousand. One thousand U.S. military bases outside the 50 states and Washington, DC, representing the largest collection of bases in world history.
Officially the Pentagon counts 865 base sites, but this notoriously unreliable number omits all our bases in Iraq (likely over 100) and Afghanistan (80 and counting), among many other well-known and secretive bases.President Obama's budget outline thus requests $664 billion in total Pentagon and war funding for fiscal year 2010. This figure does not include funding for nuclear weapons or miscellaneous non-DOD defense costs, which were approximately $23 billion in FY 2009.
"It looks like the pattern of overall growth in Pentagon spending will continue in President Obama's first budget," said Travis Sharp, military policy analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. "The annual growth rate, however, appears to be lower than was typical during the Bush years."
It's here that the giant defense contractor pitches its next-generation fighter plane, the F-22 Raptor. There's a simulator, PowerPoint slides and a video, backed by a soaring musical score, in which Air Force pilots rhapsodize about the fastest, stealthiest, most advanced dogfighter ever built.
