Posted on 05/18/2019 3:54:54 AM PDT by Kaslin
We have a good news-bad news situation on our hands when it comes to defense spending. The good news is, it’s heading in the right direction: up. The bad news is, it remains too low to fix the spending holiday that afflicted our military for years — a failure to fund that has seriously compromised our readiness levels.
Budget numbers released by Democrats, who control the House of Representatives, look impressive at first glance: $622 billion for the base defense discretionary budget. That’s an increase of 2.3 percent over the last budget the House passed.
Unfortunately, it’s not enough. Once you take the defense cuts of the last decade or so into consideration, you realize we have a lot of ground to make up.
According to Former Defense Secretary James Mattis and Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, we need between 3 percent and 5 percent real growth in the coming years to keep pace with the threats facing our nation.
I’m not just talking about North Korea. The missile danger from Pyongyang is indeed serious, and one that grabs big headlines every time Kim Jong-un decides to rattle his saber. But there are other countries of concern around the globe.
Take Iran, which the 2019 Index of U.S. Military Strength describes as the Middle Eastern country most hostile to American interests. Over the last several years, it has moved closer and closer to becoming a nuclear power, and it has continued enhancing its missile capabilities. And it actively foments instability throughout the region.
Elsewhere in the Middle East, we have a wide variety of terrorist groups on the prowl. Yes, the Islamic State has been all but wiped out, having lost more than 98 percent of the territory it once held, but it’s not completely eliminated. And the Iran-sponsored Hezbollah and the Iranian-backed Shia militias also present a danger to regional peace.
Then there’s China. The People’s Liberation Army continues to engage in live-fire exercises in the East China Sea near Taiwan, and to probe South Korea and Japan’s air defenses. Meanwhile, Beijing’s cyber-espionage and attempts at hacking computer networks show no sign of slowing down.
And we can’t forget Russia. It “regularly performs provocative military exercises and training missions, and continues to sell and export arms to countries hostile to U.S. interests,” the Index editors note. “It also has increased its investment in modernizing its military and has gained significant combat experience while continuing to sabotage U.S. and Western policy in Syria and Ukraine.”
Yet until recently, we had been cutting defense spending. That forced our military, in turn, to cut training. They’ve had to rely on planes, tanks and other equipment that should have been retired years ago.
The reversal of this trend is certainly welcome. But we can’t repair the damage in a year. On the Index’s five-rating scale of “very strong, strong, marginal, weak, and very weak,” the overall rating for our military is “marginal.” You don’t jump from “marginal” to “very strong” overnight, unfortunately.
How does one judge the right size, strength and capability of our armed forces? The Index editors use a formula long embraced by successive presidential administrations, Congresses and Department of Defense staffs: the ability to handle two major wars at the same time.
For now, the Index editors say, our military is likely capable of meeting the demands of a single major regional conflict while also taking care of its other ongoing responsibilities.
Add another conflict, though, and we’d be in trouble. Considering the threat levels out there, who can confidently say that second conflict couldn’t happen?
So while lawmakers should be praised for taking steps in the right direction, they now need to realize that it’s high time we picked up the pace.
Our enemies aren’t waiting. And neither should we.
There’s no WAY 600 billion or even 700 or 800 billion or a gazillion dollars could be enough!!!!!!!!!
because there’s NO WASTE to cut!!! not even a nickel!!!
That was sarcasm.
Sorry. Just because I belong to FR, I’m not gonna bitch support such nonsense.
What was it, a few years ago where the military wasn’t quite sure where TRILLIONS were spent????
Go through EVERY SINGLE ITEM or SERVICE that is paid for by the military before raising it another dime, then let’s talk.
The bad news is, it remains too low to fix the spending holiday that afflicted our military for years >>>>>>>>>
Tell it like it is.
Odonga and hsi liberal fascist movement decimated our military readiness.He did it purposefully to limit UIS “neocolonialism.”
If presidet Trump IS NOT elected, we will return to ecreased military spending and decreased readiness.
Not to worry though, we will have instead a GREEN NEW DEAL BUT with China, Iran and Russia sponsoring demographic illegal alien invasion of the United States. They are in Venezuela already and have purposefully created millions of refugees who push populations of South America into the USA.
DO NOT FORGET.
No matter what vote Trump!
Defend the Southern border rather than Africa and the Middle East and it'll be a lot less expensive.
EIGHT...8x... EIGHT wars is NOT enough?
Are your friggin’ out of your mind? Are eight nations trying to invade the United States simultaneously, or do you just want to collect your under-the-tale bribes to initiate more conflict? Eh?
Ridiculous. As with the rest of the government, it is a spending problem.
Just look at our border. The DoD just put out for a contract paying $7 million per mile to upgrade a stretch where we already have a fence. That is $1 million per 250 yards of fence—well over $1K per foot of replacement fence.
Ignorance on display.
What hard cost numbers do you have for us?
I agree. If we would stop supporting the industrial war complex’s fantasies like the Littoral Combat Ship the uses unobtanium artillery rounds at a half a million a piece maybe we would be able to spend more wisely. Priorities, it’s a thing.
OK
YOU backing what I said gives it MUCH more weight because you obviously have a MUCH stronger grasp on how we are wasting $$ and I would like to defer any criticisms towards my post to you sine you can give a FAR more adequate response, if you don’t mind :)
i have to look up at LEAST two words in your post :)
And I dont want to make a simplified statement that the only thing I am sure I want increased is military members to get more compensation because though I want them to, I dont know enough about what they receive now in their entire package.
If the pros on the board in this arena think they are not getting enough, then I will defer to them.
What are you, some sort of Deep State contractor/scammer?
I think your point is we might not have all we want, but when we outspend the next 10 largest military’s combined we may have enough. Maybe if we cut back on some of these black projects we can get the job done.
Um, you seem to be confusing several different projects.
The Littoral Combat Ship uses conventional munitions. That IS a failure, but mostly because the Navy thought they could use coastal vessels as a replacement for frigates and destroyers and then mission creep really set in. Now we’re in the position of having to do an emergency buy of frigates because we replaced frigates with LCS, then scrapped the frigates and it turns out the LCS can’t do the jobs it was supposed to.
It’s the DDX/DD-1000 ‘stealth destroyer’ Zumwalt-class ships that use the special artillery rounds - which we didn’t buy, but we didn’t make a replacement gun for when we decided we didn’t want to use the Advance Gun System, so the ship has an AGS on the foredeck that’s completely useless.
Keep in mind that a lot of this was politically directed by the Obama Administration - lock military funding into boondoggle projects, *then* deprive the military of the final parts that might fix the boondoggles.
Should also be mentioned that the Navy *has* all but admitted the LCS was and is a mistake (at least as currently envisioned and deployed) to the point that they are giving up and buying foreign-design frigates off the shelf to replace them. But Congress won’t stop funding the LCS program due to all the pork.
The first problem is he enormous skim for inside the. Beltway folderol.
Yes you are right. I get my industrial war complex boondoggles mixed up. Spending billions on these items while the real warfighters get short shrift gets my goat. I’m all for new tech and experimentation, but arms industry lobbying for wildly expensive tech over actual needs seems to be throwing good money after bad.
For example, was the F22 good enough to meet our needs? Did we absolutely need the F35, or did we abandon the Raptor in hopes of marketing the F35 worldwide after the U.S. absorbed all the “sunk costs” and now the manufacturers can profit on tech the U.S. taxpayers paid to develop? And why was the Raptor tooling as well as the A10 tooling destroyed? I question all this because in my mind much of this tech may be obsolete the day it introduced. Won’t we be flying better drones soon. While we will need piloted aircraft for a while, drones make a lot of sense. It just seems like a lot of “make work” for contractors on “gee whiz” projects at the expense of defense.
Ummm, wow. You seem to be getting a lot of things mixed up here.
The F-22 was going to be the air superiority fighter for the next couple decades. However, under the Obama Administration, the military was told to pick either the F-22 or the F-35. One of the programs *would* be killed. The F-35 could be adapted to more or less do most of the jobs needed to be done by aircraft to a minimal capability. The F-22 was just too big for some of the other missions and it would never have VSTOL capability. The military ended up sacrificing the F-22 and it turns out that the F-35 isn’t nearly what the Obama Admin was promising it would be.
Raptor tooling was not (officially) destroyed - in fact, that was one of the points the Obama Administration used to placate Congresscritters and convince them to vote to kill the F-22. The promise was that the tooling and knowledge would be kept preserved so that in an emergency or if parts were needed, they could be made again. Unfortunately, a few years ago it was reported that some parts needed to be made for the F-22, Air Force personnel went to the place where the machinery and such were stored - and a lot of the F-22 stuff was found to be ‘missing.’
The A-10 tooling was destroyed at the order of then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney in the Bush I administration. That and the F-14 tooling all went because Cheney wanted those two programs dead, dead, dead with no chance of resurrecting them. He had seen other projects previously cancelled come back to life and didn’t want this happening in these cases.
We will not be flying better drones than the A-10 soon, save for a proposed drone conversion *for* the A-10. For starters, drones *still* suck at close air support for troops, the mission of the A-10. There is also inherently a delay in the control loop of a drone and as AI controls still aren’t all that great, you really don’t want an AI doing danger close gun runs on the enemy near your troops.
Air to air combat is actually a lot simpler for computer programs and AI than close ground support is.
Last I heard the F-22 tooling, blueprints, other instructions all of it were stored, but the people who understood how all those things connected are either dead or in homes.
Also there was some talk about reviving it a few years or so back, but the cost to update the F-22, at least to F-35 AI standards and other aspects, would cost more than a completely new design. (This assumes that there is not a new air superiority fighter produces and hidden at Edwards or Groom Lake like the F-117 was).
There is open talk about a joint venture with the Japanese to help foot the bill for a new air superiority fighter based on the F-22.
Tooling is routinely destroyed after a certain time because it costs money to store all of the bits - you may as well ask about the tooling of Sopwith Camels. After a time even the tooling becomes antiques.
Time from concept to the drawing board is years, time to produce a flyable version - more years, then there are the years of testing, and the years of acceptance or winning a competition before the first real versions are cranked out. All those years the designed tech can become obsolescent. Modern tech then supersedes the original and often cannot be used without a major and costly redesign which then has to go through the same regimen of testing before it can be fielded.
The Obey (D-WI) Amendment killed the F-22 by forbidding export and thus the cash needed to fund up to the 700-800 original projected US buy.
That wasn’t the only thing, but it was one of the final straws. It was all kabuki theater anyway - the Obama Administration was determined to kill off whatever they could and reduce America’s military power as much as they were able.
Actually, there was a rather impressive knowledge archival project at the time - they recorded all the F-22’s assembly procedures and had all personnel involved in that explain on video what they were doing and why, just because of this problem. The Obama administration was very proud of that and used it as a point to trumpet that the decision to cancel the F-22 wasn’t a death sentence for it at all, at all.
Reportedly parts of the archive are missing. Last I heard the audit of the stored tools and archive had only managed to find about 85% of the tools and such.
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