New defense weapons to top $1 trillion: Congress backs budget heavy on future weapons

"As Congress moves ahead with a huge new defense bill, lawmakers are making only modest changes in the Pentagon's plans to spend well over $1 trillion in the next decade on an arsenal of futuristic planes, ships and weapons with little direct connection to the Iraq war or the global war on terrorism.
House and Senate versions of the 2005 defense authorization measure contain a record $68 billion for research and development - 20-percent above the peak levels of President Reagan's historic defense buildup. Tens of billions more out of a proposed $76 billion hardware account will go for big-ticket weapons systems to combat some as-yet-unknown adversary comparable to the former Soviet Union.
On the Pentagon's wish list are such revolutionary weapons as a fighter plane that can land on an aircraft carrier or descend vertically to the ground; a radar-evading destroyer that can wallow low in the waves like a submarine while aiming precise rounds at enemy targets 200 miles inland; and a compact "isomer" weapon that could tap the metallic chemical element hafnium to release 10,000 times as much energy per gram as TNT. . . .
"We are in a massive train wreck financially," Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., recently told members of the House Armed Services subcommittee on tactical air and land forces, which he chairs. "The time has come to be tough about the way we are spending money on programs that we cannot see the ability to fund" in later years. . . .
The view was echoed in a March report drafted by a panel of defense experts and retired military and Pentagon officials at the request of two prominent think tanks, the Center for Defense Information and Foreign Policy in Focus. It concluded that "the Bush military budget is being spent on a force structure that does not match today's security challenges because it is designed for a cold war style large-scale conventional challenge that we no longer face." "