ARTICLE: "War Costs, Loosely Defined: Pentagon Measure Stretches Concept of Emergency Spending," by Jonathan Karp, Wall Street Journal 3 January 2007, p. A5.

When big defense contractors start stuffing in small buys and extra funding for ongoing development programs (like ballistic missile defense) in supplementals, some smell a feeding frenzy, and certainly, there are elements of that. Oversight on these bills is limited, because the main subject is ongoing operations, not all the extras stuffed in, so inappropriate stuff (like those ballistic missiles we're using in Iraq?) slips by. But I smell something more long term and profund. Everyone inside the Pentagon knows that budgetary spending will level off--by necessity--with whoever follows Bush (Mr. I-care-not-about-budget-deficits), and as we move out of Iraq, so will the opportunity for emergency spending. That combination, along with an inevitable and much needed shift in long-term spending from air assets to ground assets, or from smart weapons to smart soldiers, means the current squeezing of the "out years" (beyond the current stated plans, typically presented in five-year increments) is likely to grow worse with time. The losers in this struggle wil naturally call it a "procurement holiday," but the beneficiaries will call is matching assets to the environment. Either way you want to describe it, I see this as another sign that the big programs are in greater danger, so contractors are grabbing what they can from the supplementals in the meantime to get as much produced as possible before cuts come, or to push programs along far enough as to make them harder to kill when the time logically comes. This is a game being played in many dimensions.