One way the military has been able to reduce their numbers has been to turn over a lot of non-combat jobs to civilians, particularly what we in the Navy call "shore duty" billets. For example, go to a typical Navy galley on base. A decade ago it would be staffed by Navy enlisted "Culinary Specialists" cooking up the food. Now it's a bunch of Filipinos manning the grills. Base weapons stations used to be great shore duty for Ordnancemen and Gunner's Mates. Now they're all staffed by retired AO and GM Chiefs. Training squadrons now employ civilian aircraft maintainers (typically retired Navy) rather than enlisted. Base personnel offices are all staffed by civilians as well as the Navy trimmed down their ranks and removed enlisted Yeomans and other admin rates from these jobs. Facilities are maintained and repaired by civilian contractors rather than Seabees. The list goes on and on. Heck, even the gates are manned by civilian security guards rather than Masters at Arms (Navy military police).
I'm sure the other branches are doing the same. The military figured they'd save money on benefits by bringing aboard civilians. I wouldn't be surprised if at the base I work at, civilians outnumber active duty sailors. And now they have to furlough them all.
but we're kidding ourselves that we don't look at military pensions as a major problem....
we should encourage large numbers of young people to join the service, but stay in only 4-6 yrs then out...finish their military in the reserves and receive a pension at age 60, which is entirely reasonable...
Obaba/Bernanke create $85,000,000,000 of magic money each and every month. Give that to the Military (just one month’s worth...Obaba/Bernanke’s super rich banker buddies should be able to survive a month without their monthly taxpayer bailout (Obaba/Bernanke are great at ‘take from the ordinary citizens to give to the rich’ (and the illegals and the moron er...Dem base).