You may have read of President Donald Trump’s mounting fury at news that he and his administration have depleted precious U.S. munitions with his entirely self-created debacle in Iran, but what if the “embarrassing” news wrecking the White House was just a subtle ploy? The American Prospect reports that voters and fiscal hawks should not ignore the possibility that the White House and the compulsive liar within are manipulating news for their own ends.
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“… [M]ilitary sources spilled to Reuters that the U.S. has now wasted ‘virtually all’ of its long-range and defensive missile stockpile, launching strikes and downing Iranian drone attacks on regional bases and allies,” reports American Prospect writer Zachary Groz. “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded on social media, saying, ‘We don’t hate the Fake News media enough,’ after CNN picked up the story.”
The Pentagon held what NBC News called a “crisis meeting” about the issue, and the Washington Post followed up with a claim that Trump lit into his defense secretary over the missing missiles, even as he denied claims of a shortage as fake news.
But analysts say if you want to spot the real location of the pea hiding under the sliding cup look no further than the money.
Democratic senators recently deep-sixed a vote on the administration’s ghastly $1.15 trillion military spending request, combined with a separate $350 billion package proposed by the White House through reconciliation. They also killed rule proposals to fast-track military contract acquisitions, and potentially quadruple missile production.
But Groz said talk of a shortage could make Dems’ blockade hard to sustain, “forcing lawmakers to sign a blank check for an aggressive war they never authorized and for future campaigns they may have no say in, all to stave off an actual crisis.”
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“The administration is manufacturing false urgency around the missile shortage to build political will for more defense spending, which is what the president wanted long before he started this war,” said Julia Gledhill, a research analyst for the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center. “It’s all part and parcel of a broader effort to lean increasingly on rapid acquisition pathways, which have fewer requirements around cost and pricing data, around competition, and therefore are less accountable, and hinder congressional oversight.”
In testimony to the House Oversight Committee earlier this summer, Gledhill pointed to structural problems in defense contracting that allows Trump to “run wild with discretionary spending on weapons, should it be granted 50 percent more budget to do so.”
Trump adores no-bid contract like the one that led to his disastrous Reflecting Pool. Now he wants an exception to ordinary contracting rules for the military, known as “Other Transaction Authority,” or an OTA — which are designed as a way for the federal government to bypass standard competition and cost comparison regulations.
Gledhill said the Pentagon has already multiplied its expenditure through the contracting vehicle tenfold between 2016 and 2024, up to $18 billion in 2024. Now Trump wants more … much more, and Congress is in a hard place to deny him.
“Congress may have no good moves left between dangerously depleted stockpiles and carte blanche for a war with no endgame,” Groz wrote.
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