Posted on 01/06/2011 12:04:47 PM PST by ConjunctionJunction
The Pentagon will have to cut spending by $78 billion over the next five years, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Thursday, forcing the Army and Marine Corps to shrink the number of troops on active duty and eventually imposing the first freeze on military spending since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The surprise announcement from Gates was a reminder for the military establishment - which has benefited from a gusher of new money over the past decade - that it will not remain exempt from painful austerity measures that federal lawmakers say will be necessary to control the soaring national debt.
In a news conference to announce the cuts, Gates said he hopes that "what had been a culture of endless money . . . will become a culture of savings and restraint" at the Defense Department.
Gates had hoped to spare the Pentagon from the budget ax. Over the past two years, he cut dozens of expensive weapons programs and more recently sought to persuade lawmakers that the military had adopted a newfound thriftiness that would justify small but steady percentage increases in the size of its budget for the foreseeable future.
On Thursday, he said the armed services had successfully carried out a directive he issued in May to squeeze $100 billion in savings over the next five years by eliminating low-priority programs, thinning command structures and reducing overhead at the Pentagon. In return, he said, the Army, Navy and Air Force will get to reallocate nearly all of that money on new weapons systems and other combat-related projects.
But the fiscal realities facing the federal government led the Obama administration in recent weeks to order Gates to cut an additional $78 billion from its long-term spending plan.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
They need to return to the auterity of the 19th century and cut out the gold-plated trappings of the aristocracy.
Start with sending former Speaker Pelosi a bill for the booze her entourage imbibed while joy-riding on US military aircraft.
Fortunately, Congress, and not the President, sets the DOD budget. 0bama may want to gut our military, but he’ll have to go back to the Senate if he really wants a hand in that!
I hope the last thing the Brits do before abandoning their fair island is to wreck anything mechanical, valuable or useful, and torch everything else.
It will be a sad day when hundreds of thousands of British, being a persecuted minority, apply for citizenship in the US.
“could Germany, Japan, etc. run more of their own defense instead of having our troops patrolling around?”
They don’t need us for their defence, we need ‘em to have our outpost bases spread all over the world for good coverage of the globe. Most of the middle east supply stuff is done and handled in Germany at Ramstein AFB and it’s all organized by EUCOM (United States European Command) in Stuttgart.
Gates’ IS disturbingly detached from real life
we need to cut the head off the snake and just let it flop out
The Kenyan Clown is determined to destroy both our military and missile defense.
It's time we bring troops home and put them on our borders to secure them. Let Afghan and Iraq burn as far as I care. You can't help these barbarians.
Let me see if I understand this .....
America is spending too much money, so the Pentagon needs to reduce costs. Therefore, they will begin the destruction of our United States Armed Forces by reducing numbers in the Marines and Army by 47,000. Have I got this right?
Yet, the Hawaiian golfer who occasionally sits in our Oval Office spent about $200 Million per day on his India trip, needed 40 planes to accompany him and rented all 570 rooms at the Taj Mahal Hotel.
What’s wrong with this picture?
We agree on cutting off money to illegals but that is a drop in the bucket in the federal budget compared to the trillion we spend each year policing the world. Interestingly, the two issues are linked since service in the military (shades of the Roman Empire) gets people on the fast track to citizenship.
And yet the civilian employment of the federal government won’t be affected one whit. Well, that’s not quite true—they’ll still keep adding on.
Insanity to cut the size of a grossly over-deployed Army and Marine Corps. My Army son-in-law is on about his 5th tour; his family sees him a year and then doesn’t see him. My Army NG son has been gone from job and family 2 years out of the last 6 and is looking at another tour next year.
BOTH of those say that the Army & Marine Corps are grossly UNDER-manned. The active units are deploying every other year, and the Army STILL needs the NG to fill in a gaping, understrength cavern. (The Marine Corps is the same...their tours being 6 months long, but more frequent.)
This already is the definition of “ride hard and put away wet.” And the pinko politicians want fewer troops??? They are insane. Or they want to injure the military and be able to say that we LOST. Or both.
They plan to cut and run from Afganistan. It went from being the “war worth fighting” to the “war we cannot win”, in their view.
Liberals seem to think that if only we would cut our military, then we would have money for all of their social programs.
Agreed. Military buildup is going to turn us into the Soviet Union in the days of Gorbachev.
Agreed. Military buildup is going to turn us into the Soviet Union in the days of Gorbachev.
U.S. military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere have, since September 11, 2001, cost about $1.15 trillion. That seems like a lot, and it is. But it's not a lot like it used to be. For example, World War II cost, at the time (in current dollars) $4.1 trillion dollars. That amounted to over 33 percent of U.S. GDP. The current war on terror is costing about one percent of GDP. So while war may appear to be getting more expensive, relative to the amount of money available, it's actually getting cheaper. http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htproc/articles/20100723.aspx
The cost of permitting the rise of Nazism, and potentially losing our freedom and culture was far more to fight that resultant WWII than the cost of policing Iraq and Afghanistan. That is also true in terms of lives lost.
"Policing the world" is another man's "projection of power."
I wonder if he’ll first shrink our military commitments world-wide prior to shrinking our military (that has to fill it).
I posted this a little while ago... and it lists a way to cut roughly $2 trillion dollars per year (at least, based on 2009 dollars)
Here’s my list of what should be cut and eliminated:
The Medicare Prescription Drug Care ‘Benefit’
Obamacare
The following Departments:
Department of Homeland Security (redundant, as the Department of Defense has that job)
Department of Energy (redundant, as energy is bought and sold - therefore it is commerce and should fall under that Department)
Department of Education (redundant, as each state has one... and all public schools fall under state control, not federal)
Department of Health and Human Services (Again, redundant as every state has one!)
Department of the Interior (redundant, as *ALL* of the US Interior is parceled out to an already existing entity... they are called ‘States’)
Department of Agriculture (food is bought and sold, so it should fall under Commerce)
Department of Labor (again, labor is bought and sold, so it should fall under Commerce, heck... it used to even be called the Department of Commerce and Labor, for pete’s sake!)
Department of Housing and Urban Development (WTF is this?!? Why do we have a federal department acting as a landlord?!?)
If you add up how much all these Departments alone cost each year... you’d save $1.391 TRILLION each and every year (based on 2009 dollars).
Add in the repeal of the Prescription Drug care benefit and the repeal of Obamacare and you’ll probably see the savings at nearly 2 TRILLION dollars a year!
They are also the fewest in number and about to retire, so it kinda sorts itself out.
:-P
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.