We have 800,000 civilian government employees in the Department of Defense. How many of them have gone to Iraq or Afghanistan for a year or three out of five years? The Military-Industrial Complex isn’t uniformed personnel. Take her off the cliff, boys!
When a ‘company’ can take an 800,000 cut in the workforce and still carry out basic functions, that tells me there are 800,000too many people working for it.
Radical idea, I know....
We need to close 200 military bases world wide . I could care less about these cuts. Why do we have troops in Japan,Germany? What a joke. Bring them home and put them on the Mexican border. And no damned AMNESTY!!
There are 800,000 government civilians.
If you run into three government employees on an average military post, on average one is a civil servant and the other two are military.
That does not yet include the hoards of contractors.
This is insane.
The vast majority of the of the DOD personnel cuts since the late 1980s have been to the uniformed active duty side.
The civilians primarily operate in an administrative capacity. It is administration which has seen the most automation as a result of the information revolution of the last 30 years. Yet the DOD still carries such a significant level of administrative overhead.
The uniformed services require some level of overhead, because of the risk associated with warfare. There has to be a designated deputy in case the leader is killed or injured. This level of redundancy no longer exists in the private sector. Nor does every first level manager have a an administrative assistant (i.e., secretary) any more. In most cases you need to be a manager of managers of managers to warrant an administrative assistant.
But the government is different.
DOD civilians are considered part of Total Force. Can’t do without them as some whole sections have no military members. The civilians are supposed to run the bases when the GIs deploy which happens quite frequently these days.
The advantage of having civilians is that they don’t move around as much as active duty. Civilians do deploy into the combat zones, they do wear uniforms and they do come back in aluminum boxes.
Everyone is cheering on these cuts but there is no word of cutting the leeches who are doing zerop for this country. At least most of the DOD civilian workforce have done time in uniform which is why they got the job in most cases.
As a member of that civilian workforce, I have been to Afghanistan three times and GTMO twice.
There is a HUGE difference between being a Federal GS civilian in the DOD and the being one in the rest of the federal behemoth. We really hate being lumped in with the rest, even as we understand why.
I see we have a Freeper here using the left's favorite term "Military Industrial Complex", first coined by Eisenhower.
When Eisenhower first used the phrase, Military spending as a percentage of GDP was greater than 10%. Now it's down below 5%. I believe that's a 72 year low.
Meanwhile all other types of goverment spending have gone through the roof.
Isn't that cool.
Bingo.