I’d love it if we could cut the military budget in half, but even cuts like this will never happen:
A panel commissioned by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) is recommending nearly $1 trillion in cuts to the Pentagon’s budget during the next 10 years.
The Sustainable Defense Task Force, a commission of scholars from a broad ideological spectrum appointed by Frank, the House Financial Services Committee chairman, laid out actions the government could take that could save as much as $960 billion between 2011 and 2020.
Measures presented by the task force include making significant reductions to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, which has strong support from Defense Secretary Robert Gates; delaying the procurement of a new midair refueling tanker the Air Force has identified as one of its top acquisition priorities; and reducing the Navy’s fleet to 230 ships instead of the 313 eyed by the service.
Shipbuilding has strong support in the congressional defense committees, which write the Pentagon bills. Efforts to reduce the number of ships would run into resistance from the Pentagon and the shipbuilding lobby.
Frank on Friday warned that if he can’t convince Congress to act in the “general direction” of the task force recommendation, “then every other issue will suffer.” Not cutting the Pentagon’s budget could lead to higher taxes and spending cuts detrimental to the environment, housing and highway construction.
We’ll end social security and medicare and throw granny in the street before we cut defense spending. Look how successful they’ve been at keeping us safe
MikeJ
$100b/yr is nowhere near half. This should be the easiest thing in the world to pass, so it never will.
John Cole
@MikeJ:
Which is why I said “even cuts like this…” We’d need to cut 300 billion to get near half.
SpotWeld
Ending the Crusader and Commanche programs was probably one of the few things that the Bush administration did right.
demimondian
@John Cole: I have a simple suggestion for that: withdraw successfully from Aghanistan and Iraq.
MikeJ
Locally, the military decided it was silly to have Ft Lewis right across the street from McChord AFB and merged them into “Joint Base Lewis-McChord”. Awkward naming issues aside, how many other places have multiple military bases that could conceivably be merged, and how much would it save every year?
D-Chance.
Just enlist the old gal. Problem solved!
After all, isn’t the military just Republican welfare? Sign up, and they’ll give you a monthly stipend, free housing, free health care, etc, etc, etc…
Sheila
“Defense” is a misnomer. If anything, our bloated military is making us less safe rather than more safe. What if we converted our entire military operation to a humanitarian operation that aggressively (NOT violently) delivered help wherever it was needed, in a culturally sensitive manner? What if we converted all our military bases into training centers for locals who wanted to work to better their own lot and the lot of their countries? It would be far less costly than the killing machine currently in place, and would define us as a friend rather than an enemy. Is this really more foolish than spending the bulk of our national budget on the killing machine, much of which is spent on weapons that don’t work as they are supposed to work or which are too terrifying to actually use, while ignoring national and global poverty, homelessness, lack of adequate health care, education and meaningful jobs with living wages, and the deterioration of our natural environment? If we truly must lead the world, why not lead it somewhere worthwhile, into a peaceful global community via peaceful means, into a prosperously-equitable global community with opportunities for all via fair trade and human employment practices, into a tolerant global community by showing our respect for all life within all cultures? Yes we can.
cleek
@MikeJ:
we could merge the entire south-east corner of North Carolina into one giant military base. call it the Bragg-Johnson-Cherry-Lejeune-Pope Range.
Corner Stone
@demimondian:
We can’t do that. If we leave Afghanistan the ninja’s will steal Pakistan’s nukes.
Steve
Long-term cuts are sensible but I certainly hope we’re not going for short-term cuts, at a time when the government needs to be doing as much as possible to stimulate the economy and Democrats can’t seem to muster the political will for further stimulus packages.
Ugh
1. Disband the Air Force as a separate branch and fold it back into the Army.
2. Close all military bases located outside the United States that are on sovereign foreign soil and bring the troops home.
3. Reduce the U.S. carrier fleet to 6.
4. Reduce the current size of the U.S. army such that invading and holding land in a foreign country bigger than Iraq requires a draft.
5. Peance and freance.
licensed to kill time
There is nothing I’d rather see than huge cuts to the bloated defense budget. Unfortunately, all we will hear is “They’re takin’ r jerbs!” and it’ll get shot down quicker than an Afghan wedding party.
Derek
It’s so frustrating. I wish so hard that we could cut the fucking defense budget.
Shawn in ShowMe
For now, I’d settle for changing the name back to the Department of War. Changing it to the Department of Defense was the most brilliant piece of propaganda the hawks ever came up with.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
Media Matters got wind of Glenn Beck’s literary masterpiece that’s due out soon. If you thought the Left Behind books were bad, just wait for the Beckopocalypse.
Captain Haddock
Might as well propose a plan to follow rainbows to pots of gold.
Ella in NM
Just cut the number of outsourced government contracts across the board, from infrastructure maintenance to research and development. Then return to allowing our hard-working and loyal civil service employees to perform the duties without the 50% mark up that goes directly into the pockets of CEO’s and upper management–not their employees–that alone would save billions. Really!
PeakVT
@demimondian: That would knock spending down by $100-150M, but it wouldn’t mean that the actual size of the military would be cut. I don’t know what is expected of the DoD now, but back in the late 1990s the military was expected to be able to fight two small wars simultaneously. The number of troops and amount of equipment followed from that (to some degree). So the DoD needs to go through that process again, but with much lower expectations.
jl
This should be considered a ‘related topic’ comment but here is an analysis of the composition of recent increase in consumer expenditure, which was subject of a Cole post yesterday on Gallup Poll.
Wealthy Are the Only Ones Spending
Real Time Economics
By Phil Izzo
June 10, 2010
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2010/06/10/wealthy-are-the-only-ones-spending
Found via Economist’s View blog by Mark Thoma, who seems to agree with it.
Most of recent spending increase from
wealthier
college educated
older (at or near retirement age)
Izzo points to other economic evidence consistent with Gallup poll results, and speculates that wealth effect from recent rise in stock market produced a wealth effect that produced the increase in spending from older people.
And Izzo says that these stats suggest trouble ahead for continued sustained recovery from private sector.
fucen tarmal
i disagree with the direction of this, not that we don’t have more weapons systems that we need, or that the first obvious cut is to stop starting and fighting wars…
but my plan is a down-to-earth, common sense approach, we look at health education and welfare as functions of military spending…i mean if teachers are going to teach to the test, it might as well be the asvab. amirite?
food, children’s health, etc, all of this can be viewed as making children “army strong” and thinking of tomorrow’s soldiers today.
gmf
I’ve been thinking about this the last few days – obviously, the military is the best place for huge savings – but nobody’s going to really consider this while unemployment is above 8% – a trillion dollars is an awful lot of gub’ment jobs….damned if we do, etc, etc…
MBSS
i love the phrase “non-defense discretionary spending.”
so when we talk about cuts we can a priori assume that the 58% of the 1.25 trillion in discretionary funds we use for “defense” is untouchable. because.
what are you, some kind of pinko benedict arnold? ay-rabs want to kill us because of our freedoms and shakira’s boobs.
i’ve got an idea. let’s dissolve the epa and end food stamps. we could probably buy a couple more drones. or maybe half of one. hmmmm…what about education? you can’t just throw money at it and expect results.
Glen Tomkins
Why just in half?
To defend our shores, we need something like 1-5% of current spending, not 50% of current spending. Bump that up to 10% if you insist on a level of sea power projection that even nations that are more dependent on trade than we are find quite comfortable.
But if you’re up at 50% of current spending, then you’ve just given up on even pretending that we have armed forces for any actual defense reason. You’re left making up reasons to have a force at the bloated levels handed down by inertia, not tailoring the force to meet any sort of reason. But if you’ve made that concession, that we have to maintain “defense” spending at least as high as last year’s, for its own sake, for no reason whatever, then your’e never going to get to even 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%, you’re not even going to get to 99.9% of current spending. You’ll be lucky to keep the next year’s spending below 110%.
Tsulagi
@licensed to kill time:
Okay, I’ll probably get a few more centuries in Hell for laughing at that. Wonder if in AF when the happy couple get to the “till death do us part” segment in the vows they duck and cover.
MBSS
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle:
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/glenn-becks-overton-window-ad-try-no
enjoy.
licensed to kill time
@Tsulagi:
It’s amazing to me that they can get any guests to show up for a wedding anymore. “Oh, thanks anyway, but I’ve got this..uh..thing….that weekend, uh, but thanks!”
kdaug
C’mon kids, we were warned about this sixty years ago. You think a couple generations of entrenchment are going to make this easy? (Let’s set “possible” to the side for a moment).
The military-industrial complex has two things going for it. 1) The military, who – thinking strategically – quickly realized that to keep things going it needed to outsource components to every state (bolts in Montana, widgets in New Hampshire, etc.), and 2) The industries, who employ the people to make said bolts, widgets, etc.
Ike wasn’t stupid – the government’s takeover of industry in WWII, which actually *did* let us win the war, is going to be next to impossible to wind down. To do so in the best economic circumstances would be really frackin’ tough. To do so in the middle of the worst recession since the GDep, with the attendant job losses, is suicide.
Of course, this necessitates continuous overseas “adventures” to justify the expenses….
fucen tarmal
really, the solution is simple, we can cut our military spending, without cutting millitary spending.
wha?
sounds like it makes no sense. right?
ever looked at a military vehicle? pretty boring…
what if we sold ad space on our air craft carriers and tanks and stuff…
i mean seriously, why the faux-camo? the way we roll? do you think we are fooling anyone with camo? why not a big ass mcdonalds ad, some boner pills, some beer ads, the works….
we can cut our taxpayer derived military spending, but still have all the toys.
advertising.
win-win.
liberty60
All Granny needs to do is figure a way to join the Army, and kick back with veterans care.
Simple, see?
fucen tarmal
@kdaug:
true, if this were a straight proposal.
i think the idea is more like “boxing out” in basketball, when proposals come to cut other stuff, you point to military cuts that could be made, and say if we cut there, we can cut here…
traditionally, even small government alphorns love big military more than they love small govt.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Hell, they don’t need to make cuts, what they need is a Truman Commission on steriods to ferret out the waste, fraud and abuse. The GAO has stated the Pentagon is unauditable due to the insane and non existent book keeping. The entire MIC is a giant money pit, where up to one trillion has simply vanished, ala the billions in Iraq that did the same.
kdaug
@fucen tarmal: Oh, don’t get me started, lad/lass.
Taco Fucking Bell on bases??? A little KFC for your downtime between patrols?
Anyone remember hearing about a US Army that actually fed itself? Remember when “discipline” involved peeling potatoes? Remember when the squad ate what it could carry or forage?
Didn’t think so. That Army won wars. Ours is designed to perpetuate them.
kdaug
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: Too big to fail, eh?
Seems a recurrent theme…
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: And the reason there won’t be a Truman Commission is that congress would then have to appropriate billions to build a White Collar Supermax to lock itself up in.
srv
@Ugh: It would just be simpler to get rid of the failed All Volunteer Force concept and go back to a draft with no escapes.
El Cid
@licensed to kill time: And our wedding MC will be the Al Qa’ida #3 guy!
Svensker
Something else that’s not going to happen: Chuck Schumer just said that Pals deserve a blockade because “they don’t believe in Torah” or a two state solution. They must be “strangled”. I am sure that the outrage engendered by this comment will be so intense that he will step down as Senator. Sure of it. Waiting. Still waiting.
MikeJ
@kdaug:
Remember at Bastogne where they made cooks infantrymen? Anybody want to do that a contractor whose only training was on running the deep fryer?
kay
@Svensker:
That’s why this thing is hopeless. They don’t just have to recognize Israel. They have to recognize the specific religious story. They have to “believe”.
Yeah. That’s happening. It’s about as likely as the reverse happening, right? Never, ever.
canuckistani
So, what does the Marine Corps actually do that can’t be done by the Army?
MikeJ
@canuckistani: Stop boarding parties on Navy ships.
licensed to kill time
@El Cid: A sure-fire draw, heh heh.
Mike G
I’m sure the Pete Peterson foundation will be enthused about this reduction in government spending and deficits. Not.
Deficit reduction is only sexy when it involves taking stuff away from people who don’t have country club memberships, not corporations. And only when a Dem is in the White House; you didn’t hear a peep from these fiscal (bondage-and-) discipline assholes during the hog-wild war spending and tax cuts of the Texas corporate-crony assministration.
Kyle
If Ike was running today as a Dem, he’d be swift-boated for those remarks by Repig assholes calling him a commie coward unfit for command, and what would he know about the military compared to Bill Kristol and Richard Perle?
Mark S.
@Svensker:
Neither does Netanyahu.
numbskull
@canuckistani:
Win battles. On the cheap.
You’d be better off modeling the Army on the Marine Corp that vice versa, or getting rid of the Corps.
In fact, the more I think about it, I’d say we could get rid of the Air Force, the Army, and the Navy, keep the Corps (give ’em just enough ships and squibs to delivery a fighting force), the Coast Guard, and the National Guard, and we’d actually have a better defense of the nation.
What wouldn’t we have? The ability to “protect” American “interests” overseas. Hell, let ’em rent Blackwater if they want dirty work done. I’m tired of my taxes paying for them.
kdaug
@Kyle:
Credentials are overrated. What matters is enthusiasm!
(And not having your ass on the line, of course)
asiangrrlMN
@El Cid: Not at MY wedding, Mister! I’m holding out for Osama. Nothing but the best for me!
Cole, my immediate reaction to this news was exactly the same as yours: Nah ganna happen. Not even the modest cut proposed here ($1 T being modest–it sounds so obscene) will be passed. Instead, the Republicans will continue to tinker around the edges with cutting spending in welfare and Foreign Aid. The same old, same old.
Mark S.
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle:
Yeah, that Beck book sounds awesome:
It actually gets stupider after that.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
The mainland U.S. was safe long before the military-industrial machine started to crank up in the 1940s. Basically it’s invulnerable to any kind of conventional attack. One-off terror attacks or sophisticated missile systems are another question.
Since a missile attack by the Russkies is a back-burner issue nowadays we can then focus on 9/11 style terror. And what’s obvious to anyone not utterly blinded by chauvinism is that the huge “defense” budget is the cause of us being unsafe. As I write this another wedding party is being murdered in Pakistan by a guy in Virginia wielding a joystick in one hand and a Snickers bar in the other. Very expensive and making us very much less safe. I have to believe that Obama is smart enough to fully realize this but doesn’t think he can take on the massive, inert Complex, so there we are.
I really don’t know what is to be done, since we currently have the most “liberal” government that is even conceivable in American politics and we’re still shitting away mind-mumbing quantities on “defense”. I may or may not spend my golden years in relative financial security, but those of you younger than me are going to have to fight like hell for decades to keep those last few crumbs from being stolen by the Complex. I wish my generation had done more to brake this insanity, but oh well.
Martin
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.):
Agreed. Only China poses a conventional threat, and they lack the equipment to mount one.
The bigger threat to the US (IMO) is our increasing dependence on primary foreign resources – oil, steel, etc. One of the greatest security blankets a nation can have is the ability to turtle up if forced to. So long as we have the food, raw materials, talent, and production to run the country, there’s really no short-term conventional threat, and any long-term threat isn’t a problem to address because we have all the resource we need.
Today, if we needed to ramp up military production over someone like China, we’re fucked because we sent most of our steel operation to China. That and the dependence on foreign oil (won’t get solved by drill-baby-drill, assholes – only conservation and alternatives will work) are among our two greatest weaknesses. No army, aircraft carrier, or predator drone can fix that.
Brett
Yeah, that’s a good idea. I mean, it’s not as if cutting the order quantity forces delays in the production line and the shifting of the development costs on to the remaining order, thus driving the time and price to get the whole thing done even further along? This is why Congress’s budgeting on military spending is utterly retarded.
And there’s a reason why we have a “military industrial complex”: it’s because it’s no longer possible to simply spam out a million tanks and planes like it was in World War 2. It takes years just to get specialized production lines set up for modern equipment, and if they and the components required (particularly electronics) aren’t there, then it doesn’t get built. If you don’t want the resulting industries that ensue, then go buy your weapons from the Russians and Chinese.
kdaug
@Martin:
Ding! We have a winner!
And where, praytell, are the people actually making things in this country anymore? Aside from coal and corn, what are we extracting, refining, and processing? Who here knows how to operate a plow (not a fucking tractor, a real plow)? Who knows how to build one?
Who makes anything here anymore that would still be here if/when the electricity and oil are cut off?
Martin
@Brett: Keep in mind that these things don’t need to be as complicated as they are – that’s actually part of the racket.
If the shit really hit the fan and we needed to start turning out tanks in a hurry, I have no doubt we’d figure out a simpler manufacturing design. As it stands, there is no incentive for them to do so.
MikeJ
If stringing out military production is just make work to keep the factories going, why not just nationalize them? If it is so important that the capability exists in the US, there’s no reason to leave it to the private sector.
mydailydrunk
one less of everything, 1 ship, 1 tank, 1 Sergeant, 1 bullet. Nobody will notice the difference
mclaren
If you want to know what your military defense expenditures are paying for, here’s the answer:
“According to a story in The Independent (UK) on Tuesday, the investigation into the sale of fake bomb detectors has been expanded to a number of firms in the UK. It seemed comical fourteen years ago when we learned that golfers were buying fraudulent golf-ball finders… The Quadro Tracker was nothing but an “antenna” mounted on a pistol-grip with a swivel that was free to rotate 360°. An almost imperceptible deviation of the swivel from horizontal would cause the antenna to rotate under the force of gravity to its lowest point. To a credulous observer it might seem to be controlled by some mysterious external force. Quadro soon began marketing them to law enforcement agencies and the Department of Defense for $995 each to search for drugs and weapons. It failed a simple scientific test. Sandia National Labs took one apart and found it contained no internal parts. The FBI shut Quadro down and arrested its
officers [in 1996]. However, the device soon reappeared in the UK as the ADE 651, sold by ATSC for prices as high as $48,000. At least 1,500 were sold to the government of Iraq as bomb detectors at a cost of millions of dollars… The fake bomb detectors have reportedly contributed to hundreds of bomb deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, including British and American troops.
Source: “What’s New” newsletter by physicist Bob Park.
(Ignorant kooks will yelp that the Iraqis paid for this junk, not America. Wrong. American funding to the Iraqi government is what pays for this junk. The Iraqis aren’t pumping any oil, so they’re broke, and the money for the Iraqi military right now comes from us. Which means we’re paying for this charlatanry.)
fucen tarmal
@MikeJ:
don’t let michelle bachmann hear you say that, she knows karate, and she could kick obama’s ass, she could kick your’s too
maus
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle: Oh man, it looks like Left Behind knocked up one of Ayn Rand’s frostbitten-rotten eggs and had a harlequin baby.
@fucen tarmal: I want to see the toughest lady in Code Pink beat her up, one on one. I mean shit, justify that group’s existence. Find a rollerderby jock.
AZmando
<5% of the world's population, 50% of the world’s bombs and bullets!
Somethin’s a bit out of balance here in the USA.
I love telling wingnuts that money skimmed off by welfare queens in the next 20 years is nothin’ compared to the money skimmed by the corporate welfare of the defense dept. in the just the next week.
Whammer
In the next 3 years we will spend over $5 billion just to run the US Embassy in Baghdad.
Cash for Clunkers cost $3 Billion, and still pisses off the wingnuts.
Compare and contrast….
Ruckus
@Martin:
If the shit really hit the fan and we needed to start turning out tanks in a hurry, I have no doubt we’d figure out a simpler manufacturing design. As it stands, there is no incentive for them to do so.
And a lot of monetary incentive not to simplify.
Ruckus
@Whammer:
If it wasn’t for that 3 billion clunker program that would be another 3 billion for defense. Not 3 billion in tax cuts. Those pay for themselves.
Joseph Nobles
Jobs, jobs, jobs.