Those Conservatives who think military is underfunded are kidding themselves. Theres so much waste at the Pentagon that only Trump could fix
“Those Conservatives who think military is underfunded are kidding themselves. Theres so much waste at the Pentagon that only Trump could fix”
Posters to this topic have only the fuzziest idea what they are talking about.
The chief errors:
1. USDoD accounting rules bear no resemblance to those for a private business.
Seemingly minor changes can affect results (loss or gain) more dramatically than anyone imagines. And the rules are under control of Congress and (less drastically) each service dept. This means politics (and all the things freepers love to hate): national, local, interservice, even intra-service. Things are done and changes get made quite unrelated to “reality” (however defined) to satisfy political goals no one knows. Or they know and cannot admit it in public.
The armed services are subject to the oldest bureaucracies in the nation. These institutions are generations ahead of all the rest, in understanding “the game” and in playing it. They play deftly, subtly, quickly. Sometimes they play well enough to pin the blame for poor results on some other party.
2. “Waste” does not enjoy a single, objective, rigorous definition everybody likes and agrees to. Not even the different individual armed services, nor particular operational units, can get anywhere near agreement.
3. Even if Items 1 and 2 did not exist we are constrained by this truism: the military is not a private for-profit business and it shares almost no goals nor missions with any private business entity. Attempts to trim the waste can produce only limited effects. The good intentions of the trimmers, no matter the intensity of their sincerity, matter not at all. In reality, the total situation might take a far worse turn if cuts aimed at reducing “waste” degrade unit esprit and capabilities.
4. Even if we could (by some miracle) cut out the waste, we are not guaranteed a cheery result.
Consider France’s Maginot Line in 1940: even if the builders laid every brick and mixed every bag of cement with perfect efficiency, even if the workers never took a single smoke break, even if every supply contractor had chiseled their bid down to the barest bare min, delivered results ahead of schedule, and voluntarily accepted delayed reimbursement, even if every cannon barrel and machine gun emplacement had been polished and oiled to within a millimeter of its life, even if every artillery shell and ammunition box was stacked with geometric precision, even if every bunker door clashed to sans any gap, even if every gravel pathway and rail bed was weeded to unholy exactitude, the French would have lost anyway.
Because focusing on all that efficiency would be solving the wrong problem.
I spent 29 years in uniform, 13 of them dealing with the very problems considered here (along with a great many other duties). Very little changed; growing frustrated about all of it was kind of like expressing annoyance with the laws of gravity.
My respect for Donald Trump grows with each passing day. But I do not rate his chances of stopping this sort of thing as very high. He may not even prove able to alter the trajectory. No matter how many “outside experts” he might hire.