WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter revealed in a preview of the 2017 Department of Defense budgetary request to Congress that US military spending is to be quadruped from $789 million to $3.4 billion per year.
"This is all moving in the direction of a New Cold or Hot War with Russia and China," Executive Intelligence Review Senior Editor Jeff Steinberg warned on Wednesday.
Steinberg noted that the big ticket expansion is in Europe, where the Obama administration has defined Russia as the number one strategic threat to US and NATO interests.
"A similar focus in Asia is against China."
However, even that massive increase in expenditure was likely to be wasted because the cost of defending small, poor members of NATO in eastern Europe was cost-prohibitive, Steinberg observed.
"A RAND Corporation war game, reported this week, found that NATO cannot defend the Baltics against a Russian incursion, and that it would take seven combat brigades at a cost of $7.2 billion a year to put them in place," Steinberg pointed out.
The costly defense build-up would also put a huge additional burden on troubled European Union economies already in deep crisis, Steinberg warned.
"At a time when the European and US economies are actually in the tank, when the Trans-Atlantic big banks are carrying massive amounts of non-performing debt… The levels of folly in this situation are hard to keep up with," Steinberg concluded.
Military affairs analyst and retired US Army Major Todd Pierce told Sputnik the money spent on the military build-up in both Europe and the Middle East looked certain to be wasted because it would be used to expand operations and policies that had already proved to be failures.
"Is the 50 percent increase reasonable? No. Is it caused by ineffectiveness of the current operations? Yes," Pierce said. "How effectively could this money be spent? And for what purposes? It is just more money down the Pentagon rat hole."
Pierce said Department of Defense planners would do far better to question their underlying strategic assumptions and recommend policies of dialogue and cooperation to defuse tensions in Europe between the superpowers.
