WASHINGTON: The Bush administration on Tuesday to justify a stunning leap in spending on the military as defence analysts criticized the budget for pumping money into conventional weaponry inherited from the cold war era.

Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, defended the 11 per cent increase in Pentagon expenditure, telling the Senate armed services committee that it was necessary to compensate for “a decade of overuse and underfunding”, and to prepare for future wars beyond the current anti-terrorist campaign.

“When the cold war ended, a defence drawdown took place that went too far ... overshot the mark,” the defence secretary said. “Now, through the prism of Sept 11, we can see that our challenge is not simply to fix the underfunding of the past.”

However, a breakdown of the budget figures suggests that relatively little of the 379 billion dollars planned spending for 2003 is directly relevant to the requirements of combating shadowy terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda.

A far greater proportion of the defence budget will go towards “big ticket” weapon systems designed for the large-scale conventional battles envisaged during the cold war. They had been facing the axe under the “military transformation” initially planned by George Bush and Mr Rumsfeld.

The sharp rise in defence spending proposed in President Bush’s budget marks a defeat for reformers who had planned to transform the US military into a lighter, more mobile and more efficient force.

Another controversial weapon given a reprieve in Monday’s budget is the crusader artillery system, a hefty mobile gun which critics said might have performed well in big land battles against Soviet tanks, but which is too heavy to be rapidly deployed in far-flung corners of the globe.

Rumsfeld and his chief strategic adviser, Andrew Marshall, had hoped to accelerate the pace of military reform, but even before Sept 11 they found themselves blocked by the heads of the armed services who refused to scrap established projects to make money available for a new generation of weapons such as the national missile defence (NMD) system, the B-2 stealth bomber and unmanned aircraft.

As well as earmarking funds for the crusader, the three tactical aircraft and a host of other established projects, the budget sets aside 7.8 billion dollars for NMD and 630 million dollars for more global hawk unmanned aircraft.

By 2007, under the Bush plan, defence spending will be 20 per cent higher than average cold war levels.

In the current political atmosphere, Congress is unlikely to question the defence budget and may even insist on boosting it further. Among the big winners will be the defence contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing and United Defence, which makes the crusader.

Another significant consequence of the jump in US defence spending, most defence experts agree, is the further weakening of Nato.

In Kosovo and Afghanistan, America’s Nato allies had little to contribute to the hi-tech air war that was the basis of US strategy. The Bush defence plan is likely to widen the technological gap, reinforcing the administration’s ideological preference for unilateralism. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.