Pentagon Hypes Russia Threat in Effort to Boost Defense Spending

Pentagon Hypes Russia Threat in Effort to Boost Defense Spending
Russian T-14 Armata tanks make their way during the Victory Parade marking the 70th anniversary of the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, Red Square Moscow, Russia, May 9, 2015 (AP photo by Alexander Zemlianichenko).

America, it seems, has a new foreign threat: Russia.

“For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union,” read the lede in a Foreign Policy article last week, “the Pentagon is reviewing and updating its contingency plans for armed conflict with Russia.” Even worse, in recent war games that imagined a NATO conflict with Russia, “we are unable to defend the Baltics,” concluded one former Pentagon official.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because you might have read it in the Daily Beast a month ago. “A series of classified exercises over the summer,” two unnamed sources told the news outlet, has “raised concerns” that the U.S. is “not prepared for a sustained military campaign against Russia.” This came on the heels of another Daily Beast report that quoted Pentagon officials complaining that the White House is “being a little too timid” with Moscow.

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