Fat on the Sacred Cow

The uncontrolled costs of new weapons swell defense figures

To budget-conscious Congressmen alarmed by the prospect of $100 billion deficits, the burgeoning Pentagon budget seems to be the obvious place to attack. In such a $258 billion behemoth, how could there fail to be fat by the ton? The fiscal 1983 Defense Department requests are up 13.2%, after inflation, from the current year, and the five-year forecast calls for spending a total of $1.6 trillion, an amount that Ronald Reagan might try to make comprehensible by describing a stack of dollar bills 107,000 miles...