Posted on 02/12/2013 3:24:32 PM PST by SkyPilot
With less than three weeks to go before automatic governmentwide budget cuts, the entire leadership team at the Pentagon on Tuesday implored the Senate Armed Services Committee to cancel sequestration and adjust the continuing resolution set to run out March 27.
In an emotional hearing that prompted lawmakers to criticize their own and blast President Obama’s leadership, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and top civilian officials laid out details of the harm across-the-board budget cuts would inflict on the nation’s military readiness and long-term effectiveness.
“Military readiness is in jeopardy due to the convergence of unprecedented budget factors,” said Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “We need help from our elected leaders to avoid hollowing out the force and compromising our nation’s security. Specifically, we need passage of a regular 2013 defense appropriation, and we need sequestration to be canceled.” Otherwise, the United States would have “a degraded capability,” and it would be “immoral” to send troops into battle, he added.
Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., called sequestration “arbitrary and irrational,” noting that it would not only weaken security but also harm education child care and airport safety. “We cannot afford to look the other way and pretend there is not a huge looming problem.”
Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter called the “twin evils” of sequestration and a year-long continuing resolution “more dangerous than it’s ever been” as the Pentagon faces its “biggest cut in history.” He warned that cuts of $42 billion by the end of fiscal 2013 would mean a “drastic shortfall in the funding we need to do training, which inhibits our capacity to fight.” The Defense Department, he added, “would have to go back and redo our national defense strategy.”
(Excerpt) Read more at govexec.com ...
Well, there are not any of those, but there are a lot of general officers who could easily be replaced by O-6s. We have way to many Generals/Admirals. I was an O-5 on 5th Fleet staff in Bahrain the past two years and there were at least 30 of us. Probably another 15-20 O-6s. That is a lot of money. I literally recycled power point briefs day in and day out for two years. I can honestly say I did nothing substantial.
The answer to no - this is not a "baseline budget" scare tactic.
This chart lays out just part of the problem. Where you see the $407 Billion in cut, those were started 2 years ago, and it is even worse (the total cut has been increased to $487 Billion, in part to "pay" for the Sandy pork bill.
This was a HUGE cut to the Pentagon under Obama I. Thousands of DoD jobs were lost, and modernization programs cancelled or scaled down.
THEN came the Continuing Resolution, which froze the DoD budget to last year's levels. There is no "increase" in spending. It gets worse. When things like fuel prices increase (and they have), the DoD has to pay those costs. The cost of almost everything is up from last year, from fuel to healthcare. The Pentagon is paying for all of that with less money.
On top of all this come the gift of Sequestration, which is the final knife to the Dept of Defense. It demands over $600 Billion in cuts over ten years, and we are already halfway through the fiscal year. So all of the first year's cuts have to come between March and September.
Then it gets worse.....again.
Obama is demanding huge cuts in active duty troos as part of his 2011 massive cut to the Pentagon, but to deflect blame for the Sequestration cuts and to avoid political fall out during the fall campaign, he said the Pentagon cannot touch military pay. So all the cut have to come from Operations and Maintenance, the life blood of the military. The O&M cuts will be 25% or greater.
That is why the Joint Chiefs are not joking this time. This is a disaster for the US and our military.
If the brass has had months to prepare and they are now whining about being unprepared, they don’t deserve the leadership positions they occupy.
Fire them all...
Suck it up. Do what’s right. Pay, house, feed the troops and cut out the BS. Start closing down foreign bases that are nothing more than outposts of America...Europe, for starters.
Knock off the crap. We are all in this together, and Zero and 0bamunists MUST own this nightmare...every minute of it and every penny of it.
I’m all for the military and don’t want to see one dollar cut - but - they over estimate their budget needs by at least 50% each year so if they do get cut by 30% they’re still 120% to the good.
But the Republicans didn't have the stones to do that. They couldn't bear the thought of the news media blaming them for school children being denied access to the Smithsonian or worse, granny's Social Security check being late. Not with an election coming up the following year. So they voted for Sequestration.......a Faustian bargain that EXEMPTED entitlements from cuts!
Now, the Americans who serve and sacrifice the most for this country have to "suck it up" - to use your words.
I never used to blame the GOP, I gave them credit even when they failed because I knew they were trying to do the right thing. Not this time. They threw Defense on the altar of Entitlements and now won't lift a finger to correct their error.
and this assertion is based on an in depth understanding of PPBES or other expert knowledge such as.....?
Let’s not forget, the DoD will get over $600 billion per year to play with. $600+ billion. Our tax revenues are about $2.2 trillion and are way too high as it is. The DoD gets about 1/4th of our real tax money. Imagine the fed didn’t borrow another $2 trillion and stuck with just what they took in. The DoD is saying they can’t make it on that. Good grief.
Is 25% of revenue too much for job #1?
I don’t play the percent game. How about you answer is $600 billion for defense and $2.2 trillion in taxes both too much. I think so.
600 B = ~ 4% of the GDP. Not too much under the concept of “PROVIDE for the COMMON defense.” This is down from ~ 8% in the 60s.
$1 for federal welfare is too much under the concept of “PROMOTE the GENERAL welfare”
Welfare, to include all unearned entitlements, is the problem. Fix this issue and the taxers will take care of themselves.
See, you’re caught in that percent game. I don’t pay my mortgage on percent of income and neither do you. We pay on dollars. So, try actually thinking if $600,000,000,000 is enough or not, not if its worth some kind of percent. I mean, do you go to Wal-Mart and the price is listed as “$1.99” or is it listed as “$0.0001% of your income”?
DoD budget hasn’t kept up with inflation over the past 30 years. Now that entitlement programs have dwarfed the DoD budget, the DoD budget is sacrificing even more than previous burn rates.
Some new facilities were constructed funded by the end of the Bush Administration, which are now wrapping up, but hey pale in comparison to what we built overseas for 3rd world nations who now are gaining infrastructure more versatile than ours.
The best savings can be made by getting rid of the litany of regulations muzzling all activity. Everything costs 10x more than what it has to cost for functionality, even keeping laws on the books so people fulfill the intent of the regs.
Today we are making lists of all HAZMAT materials we purchase (anything with an MSDS) and now must maintain lists of who by name has authority to use anything with an MSDS sheet. The bureaucracy is mind numbing.
$ and % are two different ways of expressing the same thing. % of GDP is more useful as it provides a constant method over time to reflect the amount of the nation’s purse is devoted to a given area. It is much easier than trying to measure, say, the cost of a CVN versus the cost of the USS Constitution. This is much like mortgage guidelines for how much house one should / could purchase that are also expressed as a percentage of personal income. Using the metric % of GDP allows us to measure the relative change in national priorities
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