Contractors Are Warned: Cuts Coming for Weapons

The Pentagon budget, James F. Albaugh, chief executive of Boeing's $30 billion military division, said at the conference, has "been a great ride for the last five years."

... the Pentagon's spending binge of the last several years - its budget has increased 41 percent since 9/11 - cannot be sustained. "We can't do everything we want to do."

But one big question, analysts say, is whether the Pentagon and Congress have the desire, and will, to kill weapons programs where hundreds of billions of dollars - as well as the careers of powerful generals and admirals - are invested.

In the last few years, Mr. Rumsfeld has tried to kill some weapons systems he saw as Cold War anachronisms and to push a military modernization plan. But his efforts were thwarted by what Washington calls the Iron Triangle of Congress, the uniformed military command and military contractors

Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a free-market policy lobbying organization based in Arlington, Va., said, "The war in Iraq has not been as successful as expected."

The Pentagon currently has $1.3 trillion of weapons program in its portfolio - with $800 billion of the bills for them still to be paid

"Osama is happy for us to spend billions on and F-22A fighter jet systems that can do him no harm," Mr. Wheeler said