/ world today news/ A new confrontation broke out between Congress and the White House. Two months ago it nearly bankrupted America. Now at stake is the Pentagon budget for next year, the adoption of which has turned into a real epic with an unpredictable outcome.
The annual approval of the defense budget is rarely without drama.
The preparation phase usually takes several months. Different legislators make their own changes to the budget, but it is far from always possible to approve them.
Someone, for example, wants to lobby for the purchase of weapons from those companies whose production facilities are located in his constituency or state. Others seek to reform the military based on personal experience or expert opinion.
The Pentagon’s budget is the largest in the world.
In terms of military spending, the United States outstrips the next ten countries combined. However, even this money is often not enough for all Washington’s “wish lists”. Therefore, it is often necessary to make a difficult choice – whether to build, for example, new submarines or to invest in the creation of fighters and bombers of a new generation.
This year, the situation has been further complicated by the budget deal struck by Republicans and Democrats to stabilize the growth of the US national debt. This agreement imposes severe restrictions on the growth of government spending – they must increase by no more than 1% over the next 10 years.
Many lawmakers in Congress wanted to completely freeze the size of the military budget at the current level or even reduce it.
In the end, however, the House of Representatives passed its draft budget for the Pentagon, which will be about 2% more than the previous one and will amount to 880 billion dollars.
Such a draft budget caused a very negative reaction from many “hawks” in Washington.
They are unhappy that next year’s US military spending will de facto be reduced, as long as it is not adjusted for inflation. In addition, this budget cuts the cost of replenishing the stockpile of weapons, mainly ammunition, spent on the Ukrainian front.
Since the start of the Ukrainian conflict, the US has supplied Kiev with 2 million projectiles of all calibers and tens of thousands of missiles.
According to analysts in Washington, the Pentagon will need at least 5-7 years to fill them. And for some categories of weapons, such as long-discontinued Stingers, the United States will have to spend more than 10 years replenishing depleted stockpiles.
It was the problems with the lack of conventional ammunition that the Joe Biden administration pointed to when it announced the decision to supply Ukraine with cluster munitions.
Many in Congress opposed it. In addition, criticism was heard from both the right wing of Republicans and supporters of Donald Trump, as well as from the left wing of Democrats. In total, more than 120 deputies voted to ban the export of cluster munitions.
However the hawks however, they managed not to miss this amendment.
Several other high-profile amendments to halt the supply of military trenches to Ukraine or to withdraw the US from NATO also failed to pass. They were proposed by some Republicans who are in favor of limiting US involvement in the conflict in Ukraine. They are driven by the interests of their electorate, who are already very tired of this militaristic agenda.
Now, of course, such initiatives will lead nowhere. But it’s a clear indicator of what Trump’s supporters want.
If he wins the presidential election in 2024, then it is quite possible to expect a sharp decrease in the dynamics of arms supplies to Kiev and a real crisis in relations with NATO countries, which the Republicans consider “free” to America.
But House Republicans passed amendments on the culture wars tearing America apart.
In particular, they want to ban the Pentagon from recruiting transgender people into the US armed forces with the promise of free gender reassignment surgery.
There are currently about 15,000 transgender people in the US military. They are not recruited into the army from a good life. The Pentagon has major problems with the shortage of new recruits, so it should focus on accepting LGBT representatives or migrants.
In addition, the military budget prohibits the organization of so-called drag shows on American military bases.
These are dances of men wearing women’s clothes and makeup. The US Navy even recently had its own “digital ambassador” who became famous on TikTok for dancing in women’s clothing. On duty, she is a sailor named Joshua Kelly, and after dressing up, she becomes a “dancer” under the alias Harpy Daniels.
The transgender revolution in the United States has also reached the armed forces, which cannot but cause outrage among conservative America. And now they will try to somehow limit these processes at least at the level of the military budget.
It would also include an amendment prohibiting the Pentagon from transporting female soldiers from Republican states to Democratic states at its expense if they want to have an abortion. Abortion is now restricted or banned in most Republican states.
However, the White House flatly refuses to approve a military budget that includes such amendments.
The Democrats went to great lengths to organize “liberalization’ of the US military and recast this traditionally conservative institution for themselves. And now they have no choice but to push a transgender agenda at the Pentagon level.
Also, Republicans control only the lower house of Congress, while Democrats hold a majority in the Senate. And they will certainly present their draft budget where there will be no restrictions on transgender people. But Republicans may refuse to vote for such a military budget.
The result is the impasse that is so typical of Washington in its current divisive situation.
In addition, American politicians do not have much time for clarifications, reconciliations and corrections.
By autumn, the current Ukrainian budgets will be exhausted and new military tranches for Kiev will have to be negotiated urgently or they will come to an abrupt halt. The Ukrainian counter-offensive is failing, with European countries complaining that they cannot begin training Ukrainian F-16 fighter pilots. The Pentagon is not sending training simulators to Europe pending approval of the next budget.
There are many problems within America’s military-industrial complex itself.
Military corporations are very slowly ramping up weapons production, and this is not even enough to cover Ukraine’s needs, not to mention new possible conflicts over Taiwan or Iran that threaten to erupt in the coming years.
There are major delays in the construction of new Zamvolt next-generation submarines and destroyers.
There is a lag in strategic weapons from Russia and China – recent tests of Lockheed Martin Corporation’s hypersonic missiles ended in painful failure.
Due to shortages of rare-earth metals, whose export restrictions are being imposed by China, production of F-35 fighter jets, already well behind schedule, could come to a halt.
This mounting group of problems the Pentagon absolutely must resolve. Otherwise, at some point, the entire American military machine could be threatened.
For now, however, Washington is more concerned with transgender battles.
And this is very symbolic – the cultural and political divide in the US is already so strong that even passing the military budget faces enormous difficulties. But even more important is the degradation of the entire public political discourse in America when real issues are replaced by imaginary ones.
This is a clear indication of the empire in an age of decline that the US is clearly becoming every day.
Translation: ES
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