Budget misery not going away.

The Army got eleventh-hour emergency funding relief from Congress last month, but its budget woes are far from over. While hundreds of billions of dollars in war funding have flowed its way, it is disconcerting to many that the Army ran out of money this summer and had to shut down mess halls and was late paying utility bills. The simple answer is that the defense budgeting process has yet to catch up with reality. The Army most likely prepared its 2007 budget in late 2004, and at the time probably assumed it would be out of Iraq by now, says a Beltway wag. "I'm sure two years ago, the Army didn't think they'd be spending money on Iraq like this ... The budgeting and programming are far removed from the spending process."