Pentagon's Nightmare Budget Scenario

[unhappycamper]

Pentagon's Nightmare Budget Scenario
Winslow Wheeler | June 10, 2010

Change is coming to the Pentagon. The prevailing wisdom is that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates brings it. Real change is, indeed, in the wind, but it is not coming from Gates. The long overdue program terminations and overhead savings Gates pursues are surely welcome, but they are not bringing the re-birth the Pentagon desperately needs. Luckily, others seek to do what is needed.

Gates commands real respect. Against all odds, last year he and President Obama terminated the uber-expensive, underperforming F-22 fighter. This year, Gates seeks to end further production of the superfluous C-17 transport and kill off a second engine for the high cost, kluge-like F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Impressing many, he has also instructed the Pentagon to cut bureaucratic fat by $102 billion.

When you scratch the surface, it's a little less impressive.

While Gates and Obama won that Titanic F-22 fight last year, they waffled on the C-17 and let 18 more be produced. This year, Gates says he means it on the C-17, but the C-17 porkers are laying in wait for him in the Senate where they have the votes, and the House C-17 porkers lust to tag along.

~snip~

Gates' $102 billion reduction in overhead is a cumulative goal for five years, not one, and the bigger savings don't arrive until the elusive (may-never-happen) out-years. This will be after Gates, maybe even Obama, is long gone. The first year savings ($7 billion) is a puny 1.2 percent of the 2012 Pentagon spending plan. The public schedule includes no savings in the next fiscal year, the one for 2011 that doesn't even start until next October.

[Lasher]

1. This is not working, they're doing it wrong.

DOD spending doubled during the Lost Decade



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States

Fighting over projects like the F-22 is a loser game of whack-a-mole, where the MIC always has somewhere else to flush any money that might be saved. The Pentagon is telling the President how much they are going to spend. The President pretty much just rubber stamps that and Congress does the same. Here's how we turn this around:

The DOD gets $700B to spend in 2011. This gets reduced by $100B every year until we get down to $300B - that's three times as much as any other nation. The DOD can figure out pretty much for themselves how they're going to live within their budget. Maybe they'll decide they don't really need to launch that next USS Loser Republican President. Maybe they'll realize we've pretty much defeated the nazis by now, so they can close our military bases in Germany.

It's not really a complicated or novel concept. It's called living within your means.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

2. He could ask Rumsfeld where the missing trillion went under his watch?

what was it spent on?