It frustrates me that USMC has such a small share of the budget, does a disproportionately large share of fighting and dying in our nation's wars, has the worst facilities in the DoD, has a perpetual shortage of basic things like M4s and body armor, is still using Vietnam-era equipment, and nevertheless is always the first service on the chopping block when budget cuts roll around.

If we want to make significant cuts for a sustainable future, why don't we examine the massive amount of waste built into the Army and Air Force? Their share of the budget is much larger. You can cut more out of their budget in terms of total dollar value with a smaller effect on the missions that they're capable of performing, and I guarantee that the Marine Corps' voluntary efforts at cutting waste last year left less padding in our budget than the other services' similar efforts.

Let's insist that the US defense budget should never be less than the combined defense total of the next ten nations on the list. Oh wait! That would be a gigantic cut.

OK. Try again. We're fighting the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and Libya, and we're worried about China. So how about we peg our defense budget to be bigger - say ten times bigger - than the combined defense budgets of these foes? Oh wait. That would be an even bigger cut.

I give up. Make it a gyro sandwich: shave a bit off all the Services and call it a day.

Fascinating politics.

The Rs are scared shitless of the Tea Party crowd, who would welcome drastic cuts in every line-item in the national budget (except their own entitlements and defense ain't one of those). So the party that always wraps itself in the flag defending massive defense spending is suddenly immobilized and mute.

And the Ds, good on real defense but wishing they could divert wildly excessive defense spending to domestic programs, suddenly gets a pass to do just that, or at least to reduce the hit 'their' programs would take in the tight fiscal situation we're in.

So. No constituency for defense in Congress. And no one presidential candidate making more or even sustained defense spending any big part of his or her platform.

Free fall.

Bombs away.

'Bout time...

Regarding DOD savings, he stated:

"Looking out in the first three years of cost savings, Cartwright said, readiness and operating costs are the first considerations. In the second three years, the number and structure of forces is under consideration, he said. Beyond six years, he said, infrastructure and entitlements are evaluated."

http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=64684

Is the cause of the majority of procurement waste, either through the direct oversight they have over major contracts, or through the mandatory sources of supply established in FAR, DFAR, and USC. A 55" Samsung tv is $2700 on GSA, vice $1300 on Amazon. A 1 terabyte network hard drive is $100 on Amazon, $198 on GSA, but the vendor had a minimum purchase limit of $200 so we bought the 2 terbyte hard drive for $300. GSA is consistently 2-3 times more expensive than commercial vendors, and the supply system is even worse. A motorola walkie talkie is $200 through the supply system, but you can get them 2 for $20 at Wal Mart.

I'm EASing at the end of my contract simply because I can't stand how wasteful the supply system is, and hate having to defend bullshit, obstructionist procurement requirements that force us to waste our money purchasing things through vendors who are removed from the price-reducing aspects of a free market economy.

‘The Economist’ has been covering the issue of declining U.S. indeed NATO defense budgets for sometime. While I don’t doubt that the U.S. will spend less in the future on the military (I say military rather than defense since so much of what we do has nothing to do with defense) given the stark realities and acceleration in the waning of American power.

Deterioration is evident in every aspect of our domestic economy, foreign trade, unemployment and our ongoing fiscal melodrama. Compounded upon these issues is the apparent inability of the U. S. military to bring to a conclusion wars that they have championed at any price in blood or dollars or time line.

It would seem sensible that we take a different course than the British who recently have taken a meat cleaver to their military spending before they had figured out a forward looking national strategy and what military resources would be needed to implement it. This cart before the horse approach is typical of political systems that understand ‘procurement’ and budgetary games all too well but are uninterested or confused about national strategy.

Part of the problem of American military cuts is that Congress and in some respects the White House have little interest in a forward looking national strategy but instead are enamored with DOD dollars flowing to contractors, bases and personnel within their districts. For our elected representatives this flow of dollars to their constituents is the real purpose of the U. S. military.

Finally, in the second decade of the new century the bill collector has arrived. With him has come the era of declining government revenues and an empty piggy bank. It will be interesting to see what we leave for our children and grandchildren when all is said and done?

What can I say?

The pendulum swings the other way...

One thing I welcome on the chopping block is the end of COIN cash as weapon distorting local economies and destroying viable local markets in favor of contract mafias bent on continuing instability.

Not all changes are bad, but the pending meat axe will leave a lot of negative destruction in its wake, too.

the problems are not just military.

The Bachmann crowd, for example, feels that census bureau questions are overly intrusive---so cut their budget by 25% (even after they just closed half their regional offices).

Oh, but wait. Those census questions create the data used for pesky little things like GDP and economic analysis. No matter.

Same in all those other overly intrusive federal activities---border security? FAA? FEMA?

This is the wave that, ultimately, threatens to wash over all federal activities right now.

Don't assume the defense cuts will be any more logical or less destructive at DoD.

Paul Krugman:

"But if we’re talking about fiscal issues, you have to bear the arithmetic in mind. We’re not living in the 1950s, when defense was half the federal budget. Even a drastic cut in military spending wouldn’t release enough money to offset more than a small fraction of the projected rise in health care costs.

So by all means, let’s try to crack down on the massive waste that goes on in matters military. But doing so would be of only modest help on the larger budget problem."

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/realism-on-defense-spending/

So we get rid of Marine avation, say (URK!) and it has little or no statistical effect on the problem.

Walt

.

Radical, I know, but name one essential manned-air mission that can't be done by UCAVs. Better yet, a single UCAV can do multiple missions: no need to shell out a billion for a B-2 and then another 80 milion for a fighter; one Predator (or whatever we call the next generation of the concept) can complete the mission of either, with far less risk and a tiny, tiny fraction of the cost.
With that done, we can dissolve the Air Force and fold its strategic-bombing, close-air support and air-dominance missions into the Army and Marines as new branches of the artillery MOS, where we will already find long-range bombardment (MLRS, heavy guns) and anti-aircraft (SAMs, AAA) systems and missions. It's just a question of updating the equipment.
We can also trim a ton of fat from the Navy; by replacing the manned aircraft we can dispense with the need to house and feed pilots aboard ship and by replacing specialized planes with more versatile UCAVs we can drastically simplify and reduce the planes' maintenance needs. Thus a $6-billion carrier with a crew of thousands can be replaced by a much smaller, cheaper ship with no loss of combat power. Being smaller and cheaper, these new carriers will not need the extensive, paralyzing blanket of security we currently grant to carrier battle groups.
The cost of constructing and converting all this new equipment and personnel will be offset several times over by the phased-out costs of building and maintaining multi-million-dollar platforms and training pilots.

Personnel costs, in the aggregate, make up roughly 50% of the DOD budget. I say again, personnel costs make up roughly 50% of the DOD budget. One of the reasons that you can't directly compare U.S. military spending to that of other countries is that we spend so much more on personnel. Part of that is because the DOD pays for things (like health care -- 10% of the defense budget) that other countries don't pay for through their defense budgets, and part of it is because we're a rich country with an AVF which means that we pay a lot more.
So what are they going to cut? O&M makes up most of the rest...procurement mainly a quarter of the pie. You can only cut so much in O&M or procurement, which in turn makes a fractional cut of the DOD budget. Cutting personnel is where the real savings would be. Once the economy recovers and we have full employment that might be an easier sell...but right now: cutting the defense budget really means adding to the unemployment rate.

Kill the AVF. Just kill it. Cadre military sized to actual threats, Draft backup for manpower-intensive large wars of the indistinct future. Costs way down. Defense posture satisfactory.

Throw in Army reform and i think we have a winner.

Read the Long retreat by Christopher Bartlett.
The long retreat: a short history of British defence policy, 1945-70. It is about what the Brits did when they had a huge empire and no longer had the means for a worldwide imperial policy. The Brits rationalized what they were doing to MoD through one "white paper" after another where they determined they really didn't need this or that capability.

It would be nice if our political bosses would end the wars before the budget axe falls and the warriors.

Going forward it is certainly possible to do less with less, and that is what I recommend. Any COA has to be feasible, we are not going to get a draft unless a major war comes along. Even canceling some of these programs (F-35) that have boondoggle written all over them will not fix the budget, medical and personnel costs are too high. The only way to reduce personnel costs it to make major cuts to the force.

Whatever our new policy is, I recommend in that we don't do anything to rile the Chinese up!???!?!

The DOD colssaus and "insecurity" takes a hit while Rupert Murdoch gets to see how just much he's "loved" by people.

But how will the Army chiefs be able to get anything done with staffs of only 500 people? I imagine DOD will double down on Congressional liaison.

"We're both part of the same hypocrisy, Senator...."

Everyone assumes the USA is a true democracy. It's run by a corporate cabal, with crafty PR machines like the Wash Post and this blog. There have been no cuts. And the FY2012 budget just passed by the house is a few billion higher than last year. There was so much extra dough last year that GIs got another pay raise, 3.2%, for no real reason.

The plan is to talk about cuts, pretend there are cuts, while funding goes up. We are bombarded with the myth that $400 billion was recently cut from DoD, but that is an outright lie that Mr. Ricks placed here too. That was just a figure invented by Generals in the Pentagon of what they would like in future years. Its not based on any law or Congressional action, its total BS.

General Cartright put out the common game plan. Avoid real cuts, like closing excess bases, cancelling procurement programs, or trimming generous benefits. He openly stated they'll just cut O&M and allow readiness to fall, and then scream "hollow force" and demand it be restored.

Pretty sure we have seen this story before with every Democrat Pres. in recent history. Nothing surprising about it. Also not surprising is what will happen in a few years. How about we put the yoyo away?

...is a proven way of waiting to see if the other shoe will drop. $400 billion over 10 years. It could get harder, and longer, until the bottom of the trough. What will that military and overseas presence look like? The thing I think is fascinating--which Tom mentions that few authors are writing about--what does regional security look like as other nation's military budgets are slashed and with it capability? Your nation's sub fleet is expensive, don't operate subs; just vacate the capability space. Your air force's fighter aircraft getting long in the tooth, don't fly them to their designed limits; your adversary will fly his to their limits. PGM stocks low, just patrol and resort to demarches. I wonder which ideology and/or dictator of the future will arise out of a deterrence void because leaders saw militaries--and security--as bill-payers for other decisions.

Would not be to lop off whole capabilities, but determine what and how much we need. Submarines--expensive and since the end of the Cold War largely a force in search of a mission. Tactical Air? We've spent 20 years bombing people and not almost none shooting them down. If the platform can't do CAS as a primary mission don't buy it.

Combine missions where we can. Do we really need Army/Navy+ Marines/Air Force medical systems? Combine them and allocate specialists as needed. A Ranger battalion surgeon will have a different skill set then a flight surgeon, but an orthopedist or dentist is the same regardless of his or her uniform.

We'd also save a ton of money getting working age retirees out of military medicine. Let them back in when they apply for Medicare. Either that or dramatically raise their fees. Tie the fee increase to whatever Federal Employee health insurance goes up--if FEHB has an average raise of 5% in a year so does retiree Tricare.

Why does DoD spend around $1.5B annually on counternarcotics activities that are less and less related to leveraging unique DoD capabilities againts the War On Drugs? A lot of that money is spent paying DEA or other Law Enforcement Agencies to do what they should already be doing. Put the money in their budgets and get DoD out of the business of writing checks to DEA.

Military Medicine is already pretty joint, even Bethesda and Walter Reed have divided up who does what. Don't assume you're going to save a gazillion bucks. You go out in the civilian world the hospitals don't look like GM.

Pushing retirees off of Tri-Care WILL save a gazillion bucks. It will also take away their most important benefit and probably hurt retention. Letting them back on when they are eligible for medicare does not help them much, they don't need it then. Since lots of jobs have no health care plan or none that is worth a dang, retirees will have a lot of suck between when they retire and when they get medicare.

In the 1970's, we could muster plenty of tanks on the W. German border.

Many were understaffed--- a driver and TC---and many had non-mobility mechanical problems (lack of parts, staff, maintenance).

Worked great as long as it was only a showpiece, with ADM as the conclusive backup.

Questions like UAVs underscore the bigger gap--- a need for smart, effective ground intelligence.

Flying around taking pictures provides limited tactical value, and deluded strategy.

Better to have Tom and his cohorts visit a bar in Kabul to actually find out what all those great video feeds mean.

Strategically, there are many smarter ways to address real long term problems by cheaper means, but we need to restructure and plan for that.

Question is whether that is done by DoD, or dropped on its head by others.

Conclusions and RecommendationsU.S. defense procurement and services in areas such as medical services, helicopters, missile defense, training,logistics, maintenance and C4ISR will expand through 2016. Army requirements for equipment reset are extremely underestimated U.S. Defense budgets will remain stable through 2016. Worn out equipment will continue to support acquisition andservices spending, but expect fewer air and naval platforms. DoD is underestimating the continued need for OCOfunding that will be required. The trend towards “80%” COTS technology and service support solutions will accelerate along with pricesensitivity. This will allow more market participants, but there will be fewer “joint” contracts overall; resulting infurther consolidation by and among the large prime contractors and systems Integrators. The dominant defense firms will remain, though with increasing foreign competition and acquisition of mid-tier technology and service firms. European based companies will increasingly look to compete in the U.S. as theirdefense budgets shrink at a relatively fast rate. Global contractors will compete for katie morgan and acquisitions of small innovative firms that can quickly translate commercial success into military applications and market sharePartner with established prime contractors. They are always on the look-out for innovative technologies andservices that can save them internal development and management costs and help them meet contractrequirements on schedule and budget.Be relevant to ground and special operations forces. Products and services must meet stated operationalrequirements and enhance the counter insurgent/terror and nation building missions.