Yesterday, White House press secretary Tony Snow threatened that President Bush will veto short-term Iraq funding, which is being debated today on the House floor. The new proposal would pay for the war through July, then give Congress the option of cutting off money after that if conditions do not improve.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a Senate committee that won’t work because the military must have an annual appropriation:

“I essentially have 10,000 faucets all running money,” Gates said. “Turning them on and off with precision and on a day-to-day basis, or even a month-to-month basis, gets very difficult.”

It’s easy to poke fun at Secretary Gates’ comment, but he’s right. GAO reports show that the Defense Department alone has 2,200 overlapping financial systems (they didn’t count the “faucets”). Whether he intended to or not, Gates made a very good argument for including war funding in the regular Defense appropriations bill. After four years in Iraq and five years in Afghanistan, it makes sense to look at all of the Pentagon’s spending priorities at the same time.

Some people may not know this, but Bush’s defense budgets never included war costs. Instead, they have been larded up with hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare items, wastage and overpricing, with Congress scarcely paying attention.

Item: the Marine Corps V-22 Osprey, the world’s first production tiltrotor aircraft. The Bell Helicopter Textron program was originally budgeted at $2.5 billion; after 20 years the development cost exploded past $30 billion. Other critical Corps aviation programs have been delayed as a result. At $109 million per plane, the V-22 costs four times more than helicopters with comparable abilities and is notoriously crash-prone. The first ten operational Ospreys will deploy to central Iraq in September.

Item: the Army’s $300 billion Future Combat Systems (FCS), which is supposed to design new computerized ground equipment. This program, managed by Boeing, is at least four years behind schedule. FCS has been called the “biggest defense contracting boondoggle of them all” because of its comprehensive, ambitious goals. FCS is expected to develop replacements for most of the Army’s armored fighting vehicles– with unknown additional costs.

Item: The GAO reports enormous cost overruns on the $65 billion F-22A Raptor stealth fighter project and the $206 billion F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, both Lockheed Martin contracts.

Item: The National Missile Defense (NMD) program doesn’t work and the Bush administration is spending $30 billion on it. The contractors are: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, TRW and Raytheon.

In the topsy-turvy world of weapons R&D, there are no fixed price contracts. Contractors are awarded insane “cost-plus” agreements, which give them huge windfall bonuses even when their projects spin out of control.

As Congress debates Iraq war funding, they ought to discuss cutting Pentagon waste, fraud and corporate welfare to pay for Bush’s wars.

UPDATE: There’s a kinda cool poster of the federal budget called Death and Taxes: A Visual Guide to Where Your Federal Tax Dollars Go. In the 2008 budget, $717 billion is targeted for military/national security spending.

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