We must cut more monies from the Department of Defense budget and redirect them to help our beleaguered communities. There are many practical reasons for reducing DoD spending, not to mention moral and ethical ones. It doesn’t make sense to me that our DoD sees the need to spend the same amount on defense as the amount spent by the next 29 big-spender nations combined.

We should cut another half-trillion dollars over the next 10 years, a cut that would not impede our security and would release funds for schools, health care and jobs. Since between $31 billion and $60 billion were lost to waste and fraud related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the congressionally appointed Commission on Wartime Contracting, we could insist on accountability even though that is hard to do.

The Government Accountability Office has detailed billions more in cost-overruns for major weapons systems. The Pentagon’s books have not been audited, and are not currently able to be audited, according to the Pentagon’s comptroller Robert Hale. The DoD is the only department that isn’t audited.

Our veterans need this redirection of funds, also. Medical care, income support, housing and jobs for veterans are not provided through the Department of Defense budget. For these benefits, most veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan rely on Veterans’ Administration programs, which are part of the domestic category under the Budget Control Act.

Because of the kinds of wounding in current wars and the potential for survival of even serious wounds, the needs of veterans are much greater today than they were following other wars. Recent estimates place the cost of caring for wounded veterans over the next 40 years at a figure between $600 billion and $1 trillion, not including support for housing and jobs, higher eventual costs for Medicare, and the social and economic losses borne by the veterans and their families.

I ask that we in Davis contact our senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, and our representative, John Garamendi, to ask them to preserve the cuts already made, make further reductions from the DoD, and state why it’s feasible to do so.

Marilee Eusebio
Davis

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