Sen. Inouye wrote an Op Ed piece on defending the Stryker Brigade in Hawai’i for the Honolulu Advertiser on 12/17/06. He wrote:
I have and will continue to do everything I can to support our troops. This issue on the Stryker brigade should not be a referendum on the Iraq war…
Today, less than 1 percent of Americans are willing to make the sacrifice to wear our nation’s uniform. They deserve our support.
They deserve the best equipment and the best training we can provide to prepare them for battle.
Why then did he drastically cut the Operations and Maintenance (O&B) budget that pays for training, maintenance and repairs? Defense budget analyst and former congressional aide Winslow Wheeler wrote in the Huffington Post:
And what did the Senate Appropriations Committee do to better support our troops in the new 2010 DOD Appropriations bill? They cut the already-skinny O&M account by over $3 billion. The Defense Subcommittee Chairman, Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI), with the full support of his Republican counterpart, Thad Cochran (R-MS), cut Obama’s request for basic O&M by $2.4 billion and for wartime O&M by another $655 million.
Is there some trick here? Did they refund the support of our troops somewhere else?
No, Inouye and Cochran have higher priorities. According to their own committee report, they wedged 778 earmarks (pork) costing $2.6 billion into their bill. That didn’t count some of their major goodies: one extra DDG-51 destroyer to be built in Cochran’s Mississippi but unrequested by the Navy ($1.7 billion) plus $2.5 billion for 10 unneeded, unrequested C-17 cargo aircraft pushed through by a gaggle of senators with parochial interests. To pay for this $6.8 billion mountain of lard without raising the total DOD budget, Inouye and Cochran picked the pockets of selected accounts in the bill. (Inouye calls them “reallocations.”) More than $3 billion of those “reallocations” came from the already-bare O&M cupboard.
All that raiding and juggling of accounts is hard work for busy senators but, as TaxPayers for Common Sense points out, it pays off in the form of campaign contributions. (See “Inouye, Cochran Benefit from Earmark Recipients” at the TCS website at http://www.taxpayer.net/.)
The lesson? Don’t believe all the rhetoric about supporting the troops. If politicians really supported the troops, they would take decisive measures to end the wars and reverse the military expansion that threatens and antagonizes other people and countries around the world.
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