My very youngest son, an engineer and a civilian, makes more than a bird colonel. The colonel has 20 years in age and 15 years in experience on him.
How do you propose keeping top quality people in the military? The military has some of the most dynamic leaders of our nation in some of the most critical jobs of our nation working for less than the maximum military pay of about 170,000 a year, the pay of a general. Gutting and hollowing the military of its best people is crazy, but most field grades and above could find higher pay, and some of them, far higher pay, working in the civilian sector.
That aside, the idea of an across-the-board cut for every budget anywhere in government also appeals to me. If they’d actually do a 10% across-the-board, I’d sign on right away. But they won’t.
But a trillion dollars out of the defense budget is more like an annual 20% for them.
And what you’d end up with is the lobbyists and congress-critters deciding how that remaining 80% would get spread around. Troops are always easiest to hit. They will cut the number of troops, because that is easiest and preserves all the pork, and they will argue they can do the same with planes and bombs.
And, if that were true, we would have spent 6 months in Iraq and 3 months in Afghan.
How about increasing the salary of commissioned officers by 30% but reducing the number of such commissioned officers by 50%.
There's a 20% cut in cost and I suspect that it would have little effect on overall efficiency. In fact overall efficiency might be increased as there would be fewer chiefs and more indians. Almost every level of the federal government, including the military is top heavy.
I would suggest that congress just inform the Pentagon (and every other federal department) that they have 10% less money next year than they had this year and let them figure out where to cut. If there is a problem, congress can always deal with it by way of emergency appropriations.