Experts Agree: Keep Pentagon Spending Cuts on the Table [All Bureaucracies Have Waste.]

"...Yet in the President’s $3.8 trillion budget, Obama is asking for $553 billion for his defense budget. He claims he has found $78 billion in “cuts” over the next five years, most of which aren’t actual cuts as they are funneled into other defense spending programs. On top of that, the Obama budget projects defense spending to grow by a full percentage point over the next decade. Even Republicans, who are traditionally loath to decrease military spending, made almost $20 billion in cuts to security-related accounts in the FY 2011 Continuing Resolution. The President declined to show any such restraint.

This signals that President Obama simply is not serious about cutting wasteful spending. The Obama administration needs to confront corrupt practices in Congress that allow unneeded and unwanted defense spending like funding for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Jet alternate engine to continue. An amendment to the Continuing Resolution cut the funding for that extraneous fighter engine Wednesday, showing that House Republicans are intent on addressing Washington’s spending problem. If he is serious about reining in waste, President Obama, who has threatened to veto any legislation including funding for the alternate engines should urge the Senate to follow the House’s lead on cutting government waste.

The next election will be a repudiation by American voters of both Democrats and Republicans if they fail to fulfill their promises of cutting unsustainable spending. For someone whose rhetoric often focuses on future generations, perhaps in 2012 President Obama and Congress will realize these kinds of commonsense reforms can’t wait."

I’m not sure about the precision requirement.
The whole DOD has LOST —not “we’re sorry but we spent those on top-secret projects,” but lost as in “there’s no way in hell an auditor could make an accounting here”— multiple billions of dollars. That isn’t something that can be addressed with “reform” it’s something that needs to be destroyed with extreme prejudice.

If we *REALLY* need the DOD then we can, at a later date, form a new one whilst barring any of the current workers from *ANY* positions therein; I am unconvinced as to the actual need for the DOD: there was no DOD until 1949.

Though one could argue that [because of] the renaming of the War Dept. to DoD there *was* a DoD, “Dept of War”/”War Office” were associated with solely the Army. The creation of the DoD was really two steps: 1) Dept of War was merged with the Dept of the Navy to form the then “National Military Establishment,” and 2) Executive Order 9877 assigned primary military functions and responsibilities with the former War Department functions divided between the new Army and Air Force [sub-]departments of the created-that-day DoD. The Constitution clearly shows two differing mindsets regarding “army” and “navy”: the former was restricted in that no funding could be appropriated by Congress for more than two-years, a check against a standing-army, whereas the Navy had no such funding-restriction and, given the position [geographically] of the US, the Navy has a positive defensive obligation of the coasts and waters surrounding the US: if our enemies want at us they have to cross the oceans (at the time the land-borders were MUCH more difficult a route for invasion; and still are for non-America-continent powers as such an attack would have to go through the Nations of Mexico or Canada: neither of which have so little national-sovereignty/dignity to just bend-over and allow it.)

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