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We can debate military waste until the cows come home. I live outside Fort Leonard Wood, which was the original target of the Truman Commission on war profiteering and abuse back during World War II. This is no longer a basic training post; it's the home of the Army Engineer School, Chemical (CBRN) School, and Military Police School. It's also the primary home of training for military truck driving and convoys. Think of the fight to deal with IEDs, (the main killer of our soldiers), the hunt for weapons of mass destruction, and the efforts to train our prison guards to prevent another Abu Ghraib, and then combine that with the role of truck convoys and their protection, and you get an idea of the huge amount of money and military materiel that we deal with in this rural Ozarks community.

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.