Posted on 07/20/2011 6:04:08 AM PDT by Bobibutu
The courtiers in the Hall of Mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac are lining up to give Leon Panetta advice on how to manage the Pentagon in the coming era of budget “constraints.” Most of this wisdom takes the form of platitudes of how important it is to have a strategy and to make the hard choices needed to budget for that strategy. Duh!
My current favorite is Dr. Daniel Goure's recent blog on the web page of the Lexington Institute, a pro-defense “think tank.” Goure starts his advisory by saying:
Let's be honest. The current U.S. defense program is underfunded, even at over $500 billion a year in the base budget and another $100 billion plus in contingency expenses.
Goure then goes on to discuss the need for vision, particularly concerning controlling personnel and health costs and avoiding duplication by transferring work done in government facilities, and by the military, to contractors. In other words, when times are tough, return to the old game of protecting industry at the expense of the soldier and the taxpayer.
Thanks for your honesty, Daniel, but more of the same won't cut it this time.
(Excerpt) Read more at battleland.blogs.time.com ...
Moreover, the United States no longer needs to spend a large part of the defense budget to maintain a large forward deployed conventional and nuclear forces to counter the threat posed by the Soviet Union. With a few minor exceptions, the United States is also fielding the smallest combat-coded force structures since 1950. Nevertheless, despite a defense budget that has almost doubled in inflation adjusted dollars since 1998, Mr. Panetta is inheriting a defense program approaching the programmatic equivalent of a meltdown.
Why?
If Mr. Panetta wants to nurse the Pentagon into to health he must come to grips with the real causes of the Defense Death Spiral — a problem I have been studying and writing about since the late 1970s.
...
As went Great Britain’s superpower status, so goes the USA.
Argentina with nukes, if we’re lucky.
Guns versus butter. Butter wins every time. The US is faced with the same problems that confronted other “empires.” We can no longer afford both a generous welfare system and a world class defense establishment that can project power globally. The US is in decline and the world is the worse for it.
Because we have an administration that wants America to collapse?
Underfunded? The US defense budget, the highest in the world, is six times greater than China's defense budget (number two) and greater than the sum of the defence budgets of all others in the top ten.
“Let’s be honest. The current U.S. defense program is underfunded, even at over $500 billion a year in the base budget and another $100 billion plus in contingency expenses.”
Inflated dollars don’t buy as much. The amount we spend goes up, and buys less each time.
Step 1: Pull all Pentagon operations and contractors out of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. They never served any purpose being there other than to power the John Murtha perpetual re-election machine.
AFAIK, China is not fielding multiple whole armies for nigh-unto-free to assorted nations around the world. They’re not playing “world cop”. And they’re not fielding a world-dominating navy.
How many millions out of the Pentagon's budget have been spent on 0bama's illegal war against Libya?
Take Back AMERICA!
FUBO GTFO 2012 !
I'm certainly not anti-military or for weakening the US, but in lean times some proportionate cutting back is certainly reasonable. Cut hundreds of inane programs, and send a vast amount of time and effort to combat inefficiencies and fraudulent waste first... but trimming a percentage point or 3 from the military budget is also warranted.
The Pentagon isn’t underfunded, the Pentagon is overconfident, myopic, and unable to prioritize and puts too much money into flashy, Military Industrial Complex kickback/revolving-door-jobs projects like fighters, bombers and carriers that show me little or no return on investment. For the cost of one B-2 Spirit bomber, for instance, over a thousand young lives surely could have been saved in the Sandbox and tens of thousands of horrid, crippling injuries prevented, if the money had been instead invested in off-the-shelf boat-hull-armored MRAP-style vehicles.
Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together...."
- Excerpt from President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell speech 1960
My thing is: What’s so conservative about borrowing from China to pay for the defense of Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, etc, etc, etc...
What’s so conservative about borrowing money to hand cash to afghan warlords and building schools, roads and institutions thousands of miles from home?
We have an invasion occurring on our southern border and we are going trillions in debt just to police the world.
Apples to Oranges dude....
We should start looking at the defense budget AFTER we cut 500,000 federal GS employees.
Not even the US military can predict the future, so saying that money spent in the past was a waste because of events of today is, well... ridiculous.
RE: What you said.
Thanks, now I don’t have to say it.
“so saying that money spent in the past was a waste because of events of today is, well... ridiculous.”
Right. Gotta spend lotsa money to keep the boogeyman away.
Like Obama said: Pass stimulus or recession lasts ‘years’.
President-elect warns the downturn could become ‘dramatically worse’. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28555437/
And B-2s last week, F-22s yesterday, F-35s today, same difference. Israelis, South Africans and such were Mrapping decades ago, but my daughter rode around Iraq in cobbled-together bootstrap-armored HMMMVs. One less B-2, F-22, or F-35 coulda bought thousands of boat-hull-shaped hardbodies.
“Goure is correct about one thing, however. The defense program is underfunded. “
Relative to what?
This ... “he United States is also fielding the smallest combat-coded force structures since 1950. Nevertheless, despite a defense budget that has almost doubled in inflation adjusted dollars since 1998,”
... means that spending is UP but the force structure is DOWN.
How did that happen?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.