I know there is savings to be had in the Military. I might have an issue with replacing some military jobs with civilian personnel. I may be wrong, but I seem to remember that when military gets replaced by civilians, civilians are paid a lot more. So while defense spending may go down, overall spending will go up. I could be wrong, but knowing our govt, I bet I’m not.
At most bases, civilian pay is pretty much in line with military pay for similar areas of skills/responsibilities. The military base pay is lower, but benefits and housing/sustenance allowances raise it right up there. If you cut military personnel, there are some areas that require replacement bodies to free the military for actual military missions. I am a civilian at Keesler AFB in Biloxi, MS and we train new recruits for their career fields and also provide training for specialized areas to support specific military missions. We have a core of civilian instructors that is supplemented with military. Due to the high deployment of military, we are often severely undermanned and we earn our pay. The question is whether to adequately fund so mission-essential areas remain covered. If there are drastic cuts in the military, then the result will be a cut in the civilian support staff and that is fine by me, but too deep a cut and military mission readiness will also suffer. We have had budgetary constraints applied, especially over the last few years. Squadrons used to have their own budgets and it could be wasteful due to Congressional rules - if we found ways to save a few bucks in any given year, then next year's budget would be cut - saving money could be akin to cutting your own throat so we were pretty much forced to spend every penny each year to ensure adequate funding for the next year. Now, squadrons submit bare bones budgets up to Group level and the Group maintains the purse strings which is actually potentially effective because squadrons generally had to "pad" their budget requests to handle any number of unforeseen intangibles that tend to rise up in any given year. Squadrons used to get notices at the end of each year that if they didn't spend all their money, the Group would take it to give to squadrons that wanted to buy stuff they didn't have funds for. Now, the Group does a similar thing by giving end of year calls that they have x-amount of dollars left and the units who submitted purchasing requests first would get first shot at it. The mentality continues that we have to spend all the money allocated because of the Congressional rules that say any savings over a year must be adhered to over the following years, so it's still a bit of a wasteful mess. A lot of the waste that Congress wants to cut is a direct result of Congressional rules, but that shouldn't be news...
I seem to remember that when military gets replaced by civilians, civilians are paid a lot more.
Wrong! First of all civilians don’t get 30 days off a year. They get 12. Secondly, they pay health costs, retirement costs, and other stuff that military do not. A military person we pay for the rest of their lives. A government worker pays into their own retirement and health cost so in the end definitely cheaper.