Bipartisan Congressional panel calls for huge defense buildup. Chair lauded by the CIA; co-chair is a neocon.

Defense News reports: ‘Not prepared’: Congressional panel calls for huge defense buildup.

The chair of the panel (Jane Harman) has ties to defense establishment and was lauded by the CIA for distinguished service. The co-chair (Eric Eldeman) is a neocon.

The 2022 NDAA authorized the creation of the panel, as reported in 2023:Congress announces commission to review National Defense Strategy. The article lists the panel members; all have ties to the defense industry and military establishment.

To chair the panel, Democrats chose former Rep. Jane Harman, who has strong connections to the CIA and the defense community. Harman “previously served as the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. After that, she went on to become the first female CEO of the Wilson Center, a security focused think tank in Washington, and currently chairs the board of Freedom House — a nonprofit dedicated to advancing democracy and human rights.”  [Ibid]  Wikipedia says Harman represented the aerospace industry of California, and:

She received the Defense Distinguished Service Medal in 1998, the CIA Agency Seal Medal in 2007, and the CIA Director’s Award, and the Director of National Intelligence Distinguished Public Service Medal in 2011. …..

Harman is a tenacious pro-Israeli, who used to have close ties to the U.S. intelligence community.^[8] She resigned in February 2011, to head the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center, a foreign policy think tank.^[8]

In 2009, it was revealed NSA wiretaps reportedly intercepted a 2005 phone call between Harman and an agent of the Israeli government, in which Harman allegedly agreed to lobby the Justice Department to reduce or drop criminal charges against two employees of AIPAC in exchange for increased support for Harman’s campaign to chair the House Intelligence Committee.

Republicans chose former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman as vice-chair.   Edleman “served as former Vice President Dick Cheney’s principal deputy assistant for national security affairs as well as U.S. ambassador to Turkey in the Bush administration and ambassador to Finland in the Clinton administration.”

According to Militarist Monitor,”Eric S. Edelman, a former U.S. diplomat and adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, has supported a number of militarist policy initiatives. He is a founding board member of the Foreign Policy Initiative, an advocacy group founded in 2009 by neoconservative figures William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Dan Senor widely regarded as a successor group to the Project for the New American Century. He also served as a key foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012 and helped launch a new pressure group dedicated to pressing a hawkish GOP line in the 2016 presidential campaign.”

It’s no surprise the panel called for large increases in the military budget, financed by new taxes or by cuts to Social Security and Medicare.