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Posted on 07/18/2011 6:01:45 AM PDT by moshiach
Army to shrink to smallest size since Boer war while reservists' role bolstered • Regulars to fall from 100,000 to 84,000 after 2014
Under reforms to the Ministry of Defence published last month, senior members of the military will lose their jobs if they let costs get out of control and fail to manage budgets. The heads of the army, Royal Navy and RAF will be held accountable as never before, and responsible for cutting the number of officers.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
It depends. I could get rid of a lot of useful units and add some very useful ones around the army.
Reductions for sake of reduction is wrong.
It depends. I meant to say... I could get rid of a lot of USELESS welfare back adminstrative support units and add some very useful “on the beat” ones around the army. I am tired of seeing “leaders” who never carry a rifle, were never deployed or just go to those Support Units to move up administratively before sidestepping to front line units and acting like they always were Pattons from the get go.
Reductions for sake of reduction is wrong.
You sir are a “terrorist” symp, we need to spend a trillion tax dollars to chase about some hell hole a few dozen illiterates with 70s era Soviet cast off weapons. We lose AfPak this country is going down, and if I could I would spend two trillion to chase about some hell hole a few human rats with AKs. I am a freedom loving patriot over and out.
There are two reasons why we “couldn’t shoot down” those airliners on 9-11.
1. Our eyes were pointed outward for enemies, not inward
2. Our Air Defense forces had been cut down to SEVEN bases around the entire country, from the “peace dividend” after the fall of the Soviet bloc
So, we weren’t looking in the right places and when they did finally figure it out, we didn’t have the proper assets to deal with it.
Cut the military again? We’ll get more of the same.
I read recently that Sweden has an army of 5,000.
Meanwhile, Sweden’s second largest city (Malmo) is on track to become majority Muslim. Already police fear to enter many parts of the city.
They had better train their small army for “civil defense.”
Thats ok. Pretty soon it will have to go over a million again. Just to get the young men off the streets. Worked in 1940—it will work now.
As far as I am concerned, this isn't about the amount of money, although if you knew of the massive waste in procurement you would know that we could EASILY cut hardware costs by a third and never miss it. I've never added up the bill for an adequate homeland and civil defense system, but it won't be cheap. I just think we've totally misallocated our priorities, and that has NOT been fixed since 9-11.
LOL, that would be a Fed-loving patriot, and you can bank on it.
One thing that I do know though is that we need to rebuild our bases and defenses here on the continental US. Like others have stated, let Europe handle their own problems for once, we need to see to our own house and our own needs now.
And don’t you dare touch those 150k a year DOD jobs in Iraq or AfPak (I know a guy who made 165k tax free for a year in the green zone and now he is raking it in in Kandahar), we need those lowly paid freedom defenders to keep defending our freedom from the gun grabbing medicare hating Taliban.
Easy. Tort reform. One can then dump much of the "high-rel" traceability and bogus paperwork requirements. Procure off the shelf as much as possible. You see, it really does cost $250 to sell a hammer to the military. I know, I've been a manufacturing engineer in a MIL-Spec facility.
I'd also dump a lot of the hermeticity requirements in electronics manufacturing. I don't care if it's sealed, just make them guarantee it will work with their butts on the line. Hell, the qualification for automobile production is tougher in some respects.
I probably just whacked a couple of hundred billion right there. Seriously.
Maybe I'm just dense, but how would tort reform help the procurement process? I'm not making the connection here.
As for the rest of it, I'd let the military determine what they need and how it should be built, but while I have no problem with procuring off shelf stuff as much as possible, it's with the caveat that the provider must be an American company and must undergo strict Military Security screening to ensure that we're not opening ourselves up to sabotage. In short, I don't want a Stuxnet style attack on our systems to be possible because one of the vendors decided to use cut-rate hardware or software from China, such as has happened before.
Now, with that said, bring on the reform!
'Make it to spec and provide the paperwork to prove it with every bolt, nut, and drop of paint,' as opposed to 'make it work and guarantee it' protects the manufacturer from liability for the quality of the product. Effectively, the way it is now, we have government in the manufacturing business, with armies of bureaucrats generating paperwork.
As for the rest of it, I'd let the military determine what they need and how it should be built,
No way, they're just as deep in bed with the contractors as the lobbyists are. There is no substitute for political appointees with manufacturing experience.
Good grief, do you know anything about Britain?.
The govt in the UK is a conservative-heavy coalition with a conservative as Prime Minister. The govt is having to make cuts (as essentially a Tory govt) because of the massive debt left to us by Labour 1997-2010 (Tony Blair and Gordon Brown).
‘Britain may have decided that it doesn’t need to protect itself anymore and can rely on the United States for its protection. Considering that most of the rest of NATO has long since decided to mooch off the United States, I can’t really blame the British parliament for deciding to follow the lead of the rest of our allies.’
Bollocks. We havent, we dont, and wont need to mooch of you.
You havent needed to defend us thank you. I think we British have done our share of defending ourselves.
And you were kicked out of France in 1966.
I see stuff going on all the time that is a perfect example of why centralized planning doesn't work; our defense procurement, payment, and troop housing systems have created perverse incentives that cause major problems in the civilian off-post economy without doing much to benefit the troops.
Fixing those problems is a whole different story. It's sort of like the “marriage penalty” — yes, it's often true that a married couple with similar middle-to-upper-middle-class incomes will pay more taxes than they would if they were an unmarried cohabiting couple. However, the system was originally intended to give a tax break to traditional married families with the father earning substantially more than his wife, who might work part-time or at a low-paying job or stay home with the children. A system originally intended to reward traditional families has become a perverse incentive to live together without marriage.
You'll get no disagreement with me that there's major waste in the military. I could easily list a dozen major issues that are creating serious problems in our civilian economy and making the military pay far more than it should, starting with the prevailing wage for civilian contractors being pegged to St. Louis instead of real-life wages in the rural Ozarks and the role of BAH (basic allowance for housing) skyrocketing civilian housing costs far beyond the ability of lower-to-middle-class civilians to pay for local apartments.
Then there's the issue of GS (civil service) pay scales that are far above comparable off-post jobs — for what good reason do we have pay scales that lead to police officers jumping at the chance to become gate guards for far higher pay, or cause people with BAs or even MBAs to take jobs in housekeeping or secretarial work to get “in the door” at a job for which they are grossly overqualified because once they're in the civil service, they can eventually transfer to a job for which they're actually qualified based on education and experience.
Those are perfect examples of the military paying much more than it should be paying for civilian support jobs. But what's the alternative? Do we want to go back to the way things were during Korea and Vietnam when we had poorly paid draftee soldiers doing jobs they didn't want to do, and ever more poorly paid civilian workers who did a shoddy job building stuff that fell apart after a few years? Or do we want to have such radical regional differences in civilian DOD payscales that nobody wants to work at civilian jobs at military installations in rural areas? We already have that problem with professional positions at the upper end of the payscales — it is all but impossible to recruit medical doctors and comparable professionals to Fort Leonard Wood unless they're spouses of senior officers or they have a connection to the local area.
My point is that it's easy to identify problems. Fixing them is a much more difficult issue. We have our current military procurement and personnel payment systems for a reason — fixing past problems with poor performance or political influence in hiring — and getting rid of the problems of the current system could very easily re-create much worse problems that our current system was designed to eliminate.
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