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To: sonofstrangelove
"He’ll (Gates) also press the four services and the rest of the Pentagon to tighten up their own management.""

That's right, our National defense has to tighten up and cannibalize airplane parts so we will have enough money left to feed every illegal alien that meanders across our FEDERALLY UNPROTECTED BORDERS while obama plays tiddlywinks with his former campaign managers.

I'm sure the military has a lot of WASTE, but it's usually NOT from the side of the military, it's from the side of the Congress and CINC.

I think any congress critter that takes money away from the military to spend on entitlements and illegal invaders should be impeached for National Theft and treason.
2 posted on 05/09/2010 12:03:48 AM PDT by FrankR (Standing up against tyranny must start somewhere, or the future will belong to the tyrants.)
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To: FrankR
Well, I think the problem that Gates is correctly identifying is the political games that are played when trying to make an efficient budget. There are some bases and projects that the Pentagon says they don't need, but then some Congressman may get perturbed when he finds out his district is losing jobs. There is a ton of waste in the Pentagon, and it does effect the ability of military brass to invest in wise projects. The weapons development programs of the military have been in shambles, there are so many instances where they have failed to replace an old line of weaponry or vehicle.

This is from the Weekly Standard:

In 1990, the U.S. Army had 780,000 soldiers on active duty and operated the “Big Five” weapons systems: the M1 Abrams tank, the M2 Bradley fighting vehicle, the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, the UH-60 Black Hawk troop transport helicopter, and the Patriot air defense missile. Twenty years later the Army is only 70 percent as big; it can’t meet its commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan without mobilizing about 100,000 National Guard and Army reservists. It operates the same Big Five, having failed five times to field a replacement ground combat vehicle, twice to field a new howitzer, and once to introduce a new armed scout chopper. Tens of billions invested in research have yielded very little procurement, except the Stryker wheeled vehicle and the Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected “MRAP” monster trucks that may not be very useful after Iraq.
5 posted on 05/09/2010 12:26:29 AM PDT by ATX 1985 (Time is Breath, Breath is Light, Light is Life)
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