Army Times Questions Honor Of Navy Fly-Boy By: Mark W Adams

You can add The Army Times to the list of media outlets who are fed up with the lies and distortions spewing from the McCain/Palin campaign. (Hat tip Brad DeLong)

Has Sen. John McCain renounced his longtime antagonism toward the Army’s Future Combat Systems?

On Sept. 8, the Republican presidential candidate told a rally crowd in Lee’s Summit, Mo., about an Obama video message to a liberal advocacy group.

“He promised them he would, quote, ‘slow our development of Future Combat Systems,’” McCain said, according to wire reports. “This is not a time to slow our development of Future Combat Systems.”

Flashback to July, however, when his campaign furnished McCain’s economic plan to The Washington Post, declaring that “there are lots of procurements — Airborne Laser, [C-17] Globemaster, Future Combat System [sic] — that should be ended and the entire Pentagon budget should be scrubbed.”

In fact, McCain has long criticized the over-budget, behind-schedule FCS program. In 2005, he blasted the Army for allowing the program to balloon to $161 billion, and forced the service to rewrite the main FCS contract.

So where does McCain really stand? Some bloggers and analysts have suggested that he used the term “future combat systems” generically. Obama’s campaign maintains their candidate was speaking specifically about FCS, in which case McCain may be twisting his rival’s words.

Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute called it deceitful.

“McCain’s interpretation of Obama’s position is typical of the way in which the Republicans have twisted Democratic views in order to undercut their opponents and at the same time obscure the past positions of the Republicans,” Thompson said. “Future Combat Systems is the centerpiece of Army modernization. However, McCain has been more critical of it than anyone else in the chamber. Obama has been much more detailed and thoughtful in his comments about future military investment than McCain’s very superficial statements.”

Officials with the McCain campaign did not return phone calls and emails requesting clarification.

McCain misleadingly tried to eliminate the capital letters from what Obama said. McCain infers that instead of meaning a specific program,  Obama was advocating we slowing the development of any combat systems in the future, not the Future Combat Systems program.  See, you can't actually speak a capital letter.

FactCheck has more, including the video of Obama's message to Caucus4Priorities in question, a liberal group that advocates for lower defense spending.  FCS is now projected to be a $200 billion dollar budget buster of the first order, already five years behind schedule it's designed to completely replace all of our tanks, light armor and armored personnel carriers, develop new drones and requires writing 63 million lines of computer code.  It is considered "the most expensive Army weapons program ever" according to the Washington Post.

If that's not bad enough, it probably will swallow the defense budget whole:

The Congressional Budget Office expressed worries about the program’s costs, noting that, according to the Defense Department’s projections, FCS would account for about half of the Army’s entire procurement budget by 2015 (while the equipment that FCS would replace has never accounted for more than 20 percent). What’s more, the CBO estimates that the actual costs may be as much as twice what the Army projects.

See, trashing this money pit is just the kind of thing that McCain and Obama agree on -- much to the dismay of the weapons dealers and assorted warmongering neocons that have been running things the last eight years. But instead of showing how he's a nice mavericky, reach-around the aisle kinda dude -- McCain typically goes for being an asshole instead.

This is what he's all about now. Lies.