New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd once referred to candidate Donald Trump as “Donald The Dove” for his stated antipathy to America’s pointless endless wars. With Trump planning on drawing down in Syria and seeking a negotiated end to the Afghanistan war, it’s a narrative with some durability.
Inconveniently, Trump has thus far intensified drone strikes beyond even Barack Obama levels, particularly in Somalia. His approach to the Afghanistan and Iraq/Syria wars has been to dramatically escalate airstrikes. Following criticism from Lindsey Graham, he decided to keep a residual U.S. force in Syria. And now, he’s growing the Pentagon’s war budget to an unprecedented degree.
The Pentagon budget, formally released Tuesday, will request a 139 percent increase to what’s called the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account – that is, the Afghanistan and Iraq/Syria wars. OCO is the vestige of a post-9/11 accounting scheme to separate war funding from funding for the broader Pentagon budget, in the interest of reducing sticker shock for defense spending, that has proven as indefinite as the wars themselves.
