Last time I looked, senior defense officials were looking at 10-20% cuts to help balance the budget.
The real deal now is closer to a 40% cut in active end strength of the Army, possibly down to as low as 285,000 people from the current approximately 562K (not including guard or Reserve forces).
That is a pretty big deal.
The choice is being made for the military to take the hit because the rest of the government is a sacred cow to the current administration.
I personally don't have a problem with this. I have long advocated for a much smaller Army (and Navy and Air Force).
Senior Army leaders are suing this as a way to cut future expenses. personnel expenses including retirement expenses and lifetime medical expenses are what is breaking the bank right now and no provision has been made for covering the bills on all the soldiers who have been brought to active duty for the GWOT.
Senior leaders believe that we will be able to save enough money to salvage their favorite indispensable procurement programs. They are right. If you make the Army small enough, you can afford everything you want. Heck, we could even resurrect the Crusader. Of course, we would only need 6 of them.
But Senior Army leaders always forget that Congress tells them every year, one year at a time, how much they can spend and what they SHALL spend it on. This delusional attitude among senior Army leaders I have seen before. They are incapable of accepting real civilian control over the military when such control means gutting everything.
Senior Army leaders talk a good game about being prepared for anything, about attracting and retaining high quality employees, about having the best equipment, the best training and the unwavering support of the American people. But it just isn't true and it hasn't been since the end of WW2. Ever since then, defense spending as been a matter of compromise.
There is no room left for compromise. Previous congresses spent all the money. They spent all of their money and they spent all of our money and they spent all the money that Congresses in the next 50 years will get. To put it in military terms, the national debt has eliminated the operational maneuver space for all future budgets.
We will cut the personnel to save the money for equipment modernization, but in the end, we won't get that either.
Fortunately, we have no threats to our national security except our own government.
On a side note, I read that Congress passed a bill in the middle of the night to authorize continued government spending in a Continuing Resolution. This gives them another couple of weeks of spending while they hash out the new budget. But they have no intention of passing a new budget. But you may have noticed that they didn't even bother with the government shutdown circus this time. Just passed the bill when no one is looking. Why won't they pass the budget? The Republicans don't have the power to cut the budget and the Democrats do want the responsibility for keeping it as high as it is. With a Continuing Resolution, they can keep spending at established levels (i.e. record high $3.7T) and not be held accountable for voting for it.
9 comments:
Not to pick a fight with you, but whats wrong with cutting the mil back 60% and butting out of everyone elses business?
In the bigger picture I want to cut at least 60% of all the other money spent/wasted by our governemnt as well. Frankly telling the gov to spend less is the first step to paying off the debt and regaining a good economy.
Res Ipsa
No fight.
As I said, I am in favor of large cutbacks int eh military forces. we are just hedging about decimal places. The Real issue is: what do you want your standing army to do, how much are you willing to pay for that to be done, and then build it to do that.
Our current military size is based on the self protection mode they went into at the end of the cold war.
I an a firm believer that the US govt should not spend one dime that does not demonstrably benefit the people who provided that dime. As such, I don't mind vast overseas empires and butting in to "other people's business" but it had better be first "in our business" and worth the cost to the people who are paying the cost: the taxpayers.
The lesson of Munich 1936: Hitler is not a man you can deal with. you may as well oppose him easliy when it is cheap and you can get him to cave. Once he gets into the bunker, you have to destroy all of Europe to dig him out.
The World is full of Hitlers (not just the people we declare "Hitler"). Being the biggest kid on the block makes the bullies leave you alone.
But I agree that we can have much smaller military forces and still be the biggest.
"whats wrong with cutting the mil back 60% and butting out of everyone elses business?"
The problem is the second half of the equation. Liberalism is incapable of butting out of everyone else's business. There will always be something, somewhere that makes the liberals DEMAND that we act. The result will be always underequipped soldiers facing superior enemy forces.
Have no fear anonymous. We have at least 20 years of superiority and plenty of warning of anyone catching up. We could easily give up our current wars of choice right now with no national security loss. There has never been a better time to save some money on defense.
It sounds like we are basically in agreement.
How about we put the Army on the southern border?
Astro, I am against that idea unless we expect an armed invasion from the south. The defense of the southern border, as well as ports and the Northern border are a full time job and should be staffed by a full-time work force. We already have one such force called the border patrol. Catching illegal crossings is a law enforcement function.
If the current organisation is anadequately organized, trained and equipped, that is a separate matter. i am OK with using military forces as a gap filler in the event of sudden surges that dominate the capacity of the border patrol, but otherwise I expect our government to hire full time employees to perform enduring full-time missions and to staff them properly for the jobs they are given.
If it were up to me, I would increase hiring authority to the border patrol at the expense of the DoD instead of shifting people to do duties that they are not trained to perform.
I wrote a post a long time ago about my idea to turn the Border Patrol into the Border Guard, and hire a lot of ex-Army soldiers who have been guarding borders in Iraq and Afghanistan.
From what I have seen in the news, we ARE experiencing armed invasion from the south, in the form of all the drug cartel militants, including Mexican army units. They regularly cross the border into our territory and attack or harass the ranchers and local law enforcement down there to make their drug shipments. Screw the fence, screw UAVs, we need soldiers with guns and orders to shoot these people.
Like I said, defending the border is a full time job abd need to be fully resourced for that mission. The border patrol/border guard (I don't care what you call it) is how every civilized country does this. I would not be against the BP having some para-military capability.
The difference is also a legal one. BP can make arrests, the Army cannot. Many of the capabilities that the Army has are completely out of place for border defense in the absence of an opposing army crossing. A few drunk Mexican soldiers in a pick-up truck is not an invasion by the Mexican Army. So long as we have diplomatic relations with Mexico we can influence them to control their own armed forces.
Post a Comment