Pentagon planners grudgingly accept the fact that each January congressional liberals routinely lop $3.5 billion or so off their requested budget, and the liberals regularly grumble that the military goes on buying weapons as rapidly as it had planned anyway. This year, however, the Defense Department has run up against a far more merciless budget slicer that is really forcing cutbacks in weapons procurement: the savage bite of inflation.
In the second quarter of 1974 alone, inflation added $16.9 billion to the cost of 42 major weapons systems, a rise of 13% over...
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