Just 8%?
I'll cut it by 50% by now.
Stop building the F-35.
And don't build any new aircraft carriers.
We should be making drones instead. They're cheaper.
Get Elon to do it.
The Russians have their MIC corruption relatively under control. Thieving generals do go to jail when caught in Russia.
In 2024 the Russians spent$101Billion on defense. They completed the largest mobilization since WWII, deployed air defense at least one, probably two generations ahead of ours with the S500. The Russians also deployed the Oreshnik IRBM that is two or three generations ahead of anything we’ve even thought about. Oh yeah, Russia also thumped NATO weapons systems all over the Uke battlefield. We spent nine times what Russia did! NATO spent sixteen times what the Russians did!
Cut the military by 40% today. First cut, ALL planned aircraft carriers.
8% is hardly “gutting” our defense. There’s clearly that, and much more possible with appropriate management and likely will result in improved effectiveness.
For example, I retired as director of an Engineering Technology Center in a large corporation. I NEVER had an automatic annual budget increase. I did have an annual budget review, and a good percentage of the time I had to prepare a plan for a budget decrease, generally on the order of 10%.
That actually was a good event. It forced everyone to review performance and tasks and pick out the ones that were least critical for the organization as a whole. sometimes the reduction plans were implemented, other times they weren’t. A couple of times, poor performers were appropriately cut.
This is not to say that I never got budget increases. These, though always came at times other than the budget review, and they came along with increased responsibilities. I had no union represented workers in my Center, though the company has a large union presence, and they generally had union negotiated pay increases. At the times those happened, the salaried workers generally had a reasonably similar increase. these were generally accompanied by a budget increase to cover the costs.