Procurement: April 15, 2001

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The first Bush defense budget plans to reduce procurement, from $62.1 billion to $59.5 billion. But Research and Development will go up from $40.8 billion to $44.4 billion. This part of a plan to skip a generation of weapons and thus save a lot of money on buying weapons that will soon become obsolete. The feeling is that technology is moving so fast at this time that, since there is no war, or threat of war, it would be more prudent to push the technology rather than built stuff with current technology. This was a successful strategy in the past.