by Sabrina Salas Matanane
Guam - Less than 24 hours after it was unveiled, House and Senate Republicans are calling President Barack Obama's FY2013 budget "debt on arrival". Also under attack: the defense budget.
Several aspects of the President's FY2013 budget already taking hits in Congress. Matter of fact, just a day after it was unveiled, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey appeared before the house armed services committee calling on congress to embrace the Pentagon's smaller, $614 billion budget proposal.
Dempsey said, "An increasingly and uncertain demands we be alert adaptive and dominant. This budget helps us do that. Rather, this budget will maintain our military's decisive edge and help sustain America's global leadership."
Republican lawmakers however believe the defense budget puts the nation's security at risk. As for Guam a little over $100 million has been requested for military construction projects as well a significantly less amount was requested for the marines relocation. The FY2013 defense budget also proposes terminating the Global Hawk 30 program, that DOD maintains has grown substantially in cost and is no longer cost-effective. At the Pentagon, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Budget Air Force Major General Edward Bolton, Jr fielded questions from reporters on this topic.
"In early March - I think March 6th - we're going to talk a little bit about mitigations and force structure and those type of things as part of a force structure rollout. So it's really premature to kind of talk about that at this time," he said.
It was in 2009 a $42 million dollar Global Hawk aircraft maintenance and operations complex at Andersen Air Force Base was completed, the un-manned aerial vehicles started arriving in Guam during the summer of 2010,
