Pentagon budget: top 3 winners and losers

In Pentagon parlance, the word “cut” is a relative term. The Defense Department’s base budget decreases from $553 billion this year to $525 billion in 2013, but it rebounds steadily to $567 billion in 2017. With this in mind, here are the top three winners and losers:

Winner No. 3: unmanned aerial vehicles

US Air Force/REUTERS/File
A US Air Force photo of a Predator unmanned aircraft.

Pentagon officials who worry about the impact of cuts on the military are openly celebrating the proliferation of Predator and Reaper drones in US battlefields throughout the world.

Indeed, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – or “remotely piloted aircraft,” as the Air Force prefers to call them – will see perhaps one of the largest proportional leaps in funding. The Pentagon will call for a nearly one-third increase in its UAV fleet in the years ahead.

The US military sees opportunities for UAVs not only in its current wars, but also in patrolling the seas, through what defense officials call a “sea-based unmanned intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) systems,” such as the Navy Fire Scout, an unmanned helicopter that can be outfitted with laser-guided rockets.

The Pentagon also declared its intent to “acquire advanced new ISR capabilities.”

3 of 6

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.