Posted on 02/08/2013 3:34:34 PM PST by SkyPilot
Every leader in the Pentagon has been warning for more than a year that if sequestration comes to pass the impact to the military will be severe. But the armed services' most senior officers now are telling Congress those impacts are not a distant prospect — they could be looking at a "hollowed-out" force within a matter of months after the cuts are triggered.
When the Defense Department directed the military services last month to start conserving funds, it was a good sign that the Pentagon now believes the long-threatened automatic budget cuts actually will take place. Ashton Carter, the deputy secretary of Defense, gave weight to that view last week when he acknowledged in an interview with Bloomberg that sequestration now appears "more likely than unlikely."
But the military's leadership is pressing hard to make sure Congress understands its point of view on what sequestration would actually mean should it take effect midway through a fiscal year in which a DoD budget still has not been enacted.
A letter to lawmakers, signed by each member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, opened with the admonition that "the readiness of our armed forces is at a tipping point. We are on the brink."
"We don't sign 28-star letters very often," Adm. James Winnefeld, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told an AFCEA convention in San Diego last week. "We did it because we are at serious risk of rapidly sliding into a hollow force."
(Excerpt) Read more at federalnewsradio.com ...
Cut loose Pakistan and Afghanistan and every other country we support and they continually bad mouth us.
We will be flush with cash in no time.
DOD and the services have something like 800,000 civilian employees total. That’s an amazing figure. Some do critical tasks but surely many do not. That’s where I would start cutting. Also, if I understand this correctly, sequestration brings the Pentagon back to its 2006 budget adjusted upward for inflation - it seems to me that this should be enough money to adequately defend us.
Whenever cuts are threatened, the first thing bureaucrats do is announce that the most important spending will be cut first, in order to stir up opposition to any cuts. So we read articles about not being able to refuel aircraft carriers. This is just another version of what the public education racket does: any threatened cuts will lead to fewer teachers, overcrowded classrooms, hungry students, and a whole parade of other horribles.
You think having a hollow force is okay as long as it’s on stand-by?
Give them more funding for public/government education, environmentalism, regulating against property rights, busting families, etc., or they’ll shut down our defense. It’s an extortion racket. Funny thing is, our major cities are mostly populated by liberal/left, anti-defense folks. They would suffer the most, if foreign enemies were to attack our country.
panetta cutting wages...
Africa!
and no Christian brotherhood....
what this is all leading up to of course is a draft... a nice little draft.......
The truth is bureaucratic rule #1:
“When cutbacks come, offer to cut the meat, not the fat.”
In the DoD, this amounts to, “A $10 cut! That means we will have to shut down BOTH the Marine Corps and the Ballistic Missile Program!”
Here is current spending, as of 2009-2010, which includes Iraq and Afghanistan:
Operations and maintenance - $283.3 billion
Military Personnel - $154.2b
Procurement - $140.1b
Research, Development, Testing & Evaluation - $79.1b
Military Construction - $23.9b
Family Housing - $3.1b
Total Spending - $683.7b
So let’s start cutting spending in Operations.
Right now, US personnel are stationed in about 100 countries around the world, though we need for current ops and potential ops, personnel in perhaps 25 countries. After the one time expense of bringing those in the other 75 countries home, you save maybe $50b right there.
Most of the rest could be saved just by improving the procurement process. For example, when a ship is commissioned to be built, its initial price is doubled or tripled by changes ordered to it *during construction*.
Instead, when a ship is designed, have a “date certain” when the design is finished. From that point, only changes personally approved by the Secretary of the Navy may be made, and for critical functions only. Equipment and electronics that are frequently upgraded must be modular.
This kills off the vast majority of cost and construction overruns. Saving billions of dollars.
Somehow I don’t think we’ll have a hollow force. The 2013 DoD budget is 614 billion dollars. Why do we provide a security blanket for Germany, Japan, and South Korea? They have the 4th, 3rd, and 15th best economies. I think it’s about time they stand up for themselves.
DoD budget: http://comptroller.defense.gov/budget.html
The chicks better sign up for the draft since they can “do anything a man can do”.
When the unconstitutional parts of the budget have been eliminated - and my taxes have been reduced by 2/3 as a result - I’ll be happy to look at the military budget next.
“By year’s end, troops will be unable to respond to crises, Pentagon says”
Crises like Benghazi, right?
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