The Army got eleventh-hour emergency funding relief from Congress last month, but its budget woes are far from over. While hundreds of billions of dollars in war funding have flowed its way, it is disconcerting to many that the Army ran out of money this summer and had to shut down mess halls and was late paying utility bills. The simple answer is that the defense budgeting process has yet to catch up with reality. The Army most likely prepared its 2007 budget in late 2004, and at the time probably assumed it would be out of Iraq by now, says a Beltway wag. “I’m sure two years ago, the Army didn’t think they’d be spending money on Iraq like this … The budgeting and programming are far removed from the spending process.”
In another bit of distressing budget news, the Defense Department is forecasting soaring costs for repairs and maintenance of weapons systems. The Pentagon’s inventory of 374,000 major weapons systems — worth about $700 billion — continues to get more expensive to operate and keep in working order, says David V. Pauling, assistant deputy undersecretary of defense for materiel readiness. Two years ago, maintaining those systems cost $59 billion. Now, the bill is up to $72 billion. While Pauling’s office is looking at ways to trim these expenses, no immediate relief is in sight.
In what appears to be a sign of growing appreciation for the value of diplomacy and cultural relations, applications to become Army “foreign area officers” are on the rise. FAOs are skilled at foreign languages, cultures and politics. They are dispatched to countries around the world to advise ambassadors and senior commanders. The Army currently has 1,000 FAOs in its ranks, but expects to add more, says Col. Daniel Fagundes, who oversees the program at Army headquarters. The selection process is stringent. Only 5 to 10 percent of the aspirants (who must be captains or higher) make the cut. In the latest round, an unprecedented 359 candidates applied.
The work is rewarding and intellectually challenging, but not without its share of frustration, says Maj. Keith Phillips, a FAO who spent a year in Cairo. In many parts of the globe, especially third world countries, people regard the U.S. military as exceedingly powerful. “Our challenge is managing expectations,” he says. “They think we can fix everything … They view the U.S. as omnipotent. They couldn’t believe we couldn’t just fix things in the world.”
One of the architects of the much-ridiculed Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s “total information awareness” system says it’s time for the U.S. government to invest in protecting the privacy of citizens’ personal data.
Robert L. Popp, who helped conceive TIA in 2002 while working at DARPA with retired Adm. John Poindexter, says the government should be able to obtain information to combat terrorism, but it should do more to ensure privacy rights are not violated. TIA, which Congress killed in 2003, was a data-mining system intended to detect terrorists. But it came under fire because it would give law enforcement access to private data without a search warrant.
Popp, who is now in private industry, says the government fails to grasp how much information on U.S. citizens is available in third-party hands.
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