<...There is a simple explanation for the about-face. "You had the resistance of the military services to rapid change," said Loren Thompson, a military specialist at the Lexington Institute, a conservative policy group in Arlington, Virginia. "You had the relative superficiality of the Bush administration's transformation vision. Trying to make a major change in defense spending is extremely difficult, and there is no political support for it."

In Congress, Thompson said, members often see the Pentagon budget as a jobs program. "You have 120 members of the depot maintenance caucus and there is no military transformation caucus," he said. "That pretty much says it all."



This is old news. Every administration that has tried to streamline the Defense Department has hit the same wall. At least Rumsfeld was trying to trim spending, which I suppose no one will give him credit for. I think that if Bush had taken this to the public and described the programs and funding situation, he might have made some progress. Defense spending has to stop being a local district issue and made into a national one.