Personally I am in favor of doing an across the board 10% cut in budget for every Federal Department for the next 3 years including the defense budget. I also think that we have way too many Generals and other high mucky mucks in the military, especially considering that we are not currently engaged in something like WWII. We also have way too many stupid bureaucrats in the pentagon and too many vendors who have landed cushy construction jobs because they know the right Senator or Congressman.
So I favor cutting everything by 10% immediately and telling the secretaries of each department that they need to deal with the fact that they are only going to have 90% of the money they had last year to deal with this year.
I would not suggest that any member of the military have their pay cut, but then military pay for enlisted personnel has never been a big budget issue. The problem in the military is that it is top heavy. An across the board cut of 30% over 3 years is not going to kill anyone. I've had to do that several times in my lifetime. Austerity is everyone's problem when you are 20 trillion dollars in the red.
My very youngest son, an engineer and a civilian, makes more than a bird colonel. The colonel has 20 years in age and 15 years in experience on him.
How do you propose keeping top quality people in the military? The military has some of the most dynamic leaders of our nation in some of the most critical jobs of our nation working for less than the maximum military pay of about 170,000 a year, the pay of a general. Gutting and hollowing the military of its best people is crazy, but most field grades and above could find higher pay, and some of them, far higher pay, working in the civilian sector.
That aside, the idea of an across-the-board cut for every budget anywhere in government also appeals to me. If they’d actually do a 10% across-the-board, I’d sign on right away. But they won’t.
But a trillion dollars out of the defense budget is more like an annual 20% for them.
And what you’d end up with is the lobbyists and congress-critters deciding how that remaining 80% would get spread around. Troops are always easiest to hit. They will cut the number of troops, because that is easiest and preserves all the pork, and they will argue they can do the same with planes and bombs.
And, if that were true, we would have spent 6 months in Iraq and 3 months in Afghan.