Obama administration Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been receiving high praise of late for his efforts to cut costs at the Pentagon. The most obvious case in point is the recent cover story in Newsweek that portrays Gates as the second coming of Dwight Eisenhower.
There's no question that Gates has made an effort. In his first year in office, he ended the F-22 fighter program, trimmed some of the more dysfunctional missile defense programs, and cancelled the vastly overpriced Presidential helicopter. This year he is trotting out a series of management reforms that include reducing "gold-plating" -- the practice of adding more and more capabilities to a weapons system without regard to cost -- to increasing competitive bidding for service contracts. His procurement reform package includes 23 initiatives in all, all designed to get more "bang for the buck" out of Pentagon spending.
There's just one major problem with Gates's approach (along with many minor ones, but I won't go into them here). He wants to keep increasing the military budget, which is already at post-World War II highs. As noted in the recent report of the Sustainable Defense Task Force -- a group of experts convened with the encouragement of Rep. Barney Frank (which includes yours truly as a member) -- the only real way to introduce fiscal discipline at the Pentagon is to cut spending. As long as contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin know that what Gates takes away with one hand will be given back with the other, they have no real incentive to cut costs. And if Gates's reforms do manage to reduce costs, the savings should go to the taxpayers, not the weapons makers.
Take Lockheed Martin for example. When Gates ended their F-22 combat aircraft last year -- a budget cut of about $4 billion -- he increased the company's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program by a comparable amount (about $4 billion). He even bragged that the F-35 increase would create more jobs than the number lost as a result of the F-22 cancellation, noting that "I think we've done a pretty good job of taking care of the industrial base."
Even Gates's examples of programs he hopes to get under control underscore the limits of his approach. He takes pride in the fact that his department will scale back the speed and size of a new ballistic-missile firing submarine so that its projected costs are more like $5 billion than $7 billion per ship. Leaving aside the question of whether these savings can be realized, why build a new missile-firing submarine at all? The administration has pledged to cut nuclear weapons substantially, and using these large submarines to fire non-nuclear missiles is an immensely expensive way to accomplish that task.
As Laura Peterson of Taxpayers for Common Sense writes in the organization's blog, "If Gates would try applying the affordability test to military personnel, operations and our national security strategy, we might find some real savings." The strategy is key -- as long as it is U.S. policy to maintain over 700 overseas military bases and a Navy, Army and Air Force designed to go anywhere and fight any battle, military spending will continue to go up, and there will be plenty of money for the weapons industry. In a tight budgetary environment, this spending will come at the expense of other priorities -- from deficit reduction to infrastructure investment to aid to the unemployed. Regardless of how one thinks the savings should be spent -- or not spent, so as to reduce the deficit -- the Pentagon needs to go on a serious diet. If Robert Gates takes on that task, he can truly be seen as a reformer.
Our job is to tell them how much they get to spend, they figure out how to best spend it.
Gates is doing his job. Obama and Congress need to do their job: cut defense spending.
There are 90,000 US troops in Japan and Germany that cost much more.
That's the American Empire that needs to be dismantled.
Maybe that's what they meant, but I doubt it.
We are the leading member of a comprehensive, cohesive alliance that has proven itself over and over: NATO. We also have trustworthy, dependable allies in Asia. So why do we continue to post forces of occupation in the homelands of our World War 2 enemies, and why do we not account for their contributions to any potential war in assessing our own needs?
Our total expenditures dwarf those of the next 20 big military spenders, combined. I keep asking, "If we are really as smart as our DoD contractors and politicians say we are, how come we have to spend so much more than everyone else on defense?" Of course, the answer is that we are not really any smarter, and that our military budget is yet another example of welfare for the rich. I should not complain: you taxpayers have been paying over $300,000 per year for my services. (No, I make much less than that, but it includes lots of middlemen.) Perhaps the Tea Party should complain about folks like me vice the poor. Think they will? Ha!
https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/us.html
The five largest European Union Nations
Germany 82.3 mil people GDP $2.81 Tril (34,200/pp) 1.5% 42 Billion
U.K. 61.1 mil people GDP $2.17 Tril (35,400/pp) 2.4% 52 Billion
France 64.1 mil people GDP $2.11 Tril (32,800/pp) 2.6% 55 Billion
Italy 58.1 mil people GDP $1.76 Tril (30,200/pp) 1.8% 32 Billion
Spain 40.5 mil people GDP $1.36 Tril (33,700/pp) 1.2% 16 Billion
Total 306.1 mil people Total GDP 10.21 Tril 197 Billion Dollars military Spending
USA 307.2 mil people GDP 14.25 Tril (41,600/pp) 2010 663 billion
CANADA 33.5 mil people GDP 1.29 Tril (38,400/pp) 1.1% 14 Billion
MEXICO 111.2 mil people GDP 1.47 Tril (13,200/pp) 0.5% 7 Billion
Return the rest to the treasury.
We could probably cut half (if not more) of our overseas bases. The time has long past when we should feel obligated to defend West Germany, Europe, Japan or Korea. They have strong and vibrant enough economies to defend themselves.
And our navy is second to none. We should mothball about half of our carrier-battle groups. No navy in the world would even then come close to matching ours.
And then spend some of the money saved on our veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan on treating PTSD and brain injuries and other wounds. This alone will take a significant chunk of our defense spending if we do it properly, as we should.
they control the gov not the other way around.
kind of like this axiom.
with communism man exploits man with capitalism it is the other way around.
naw lets keep that love affair with capitalism going it is working so well we now have confirmed corp capitalists in the supreme court.
after all a corp is a person and money is free speech.
we have only begun to see the results of thirty years of deregulated capitalism reagan style.
reagan was a genius he helped americans fall in love with capitalism free trade free markets trickle down theory.
pure genius.
the rich have been smiling for 30 years and of course want more. ie human thing, greed.
corporations actually get tax breaks for taking jobs out of america.
man that is the genius of the capitalists ten times smarter than most americans.
they can even get the tea party folks to do their dirty work for them. pure genius.
they can even get the supreme court to do their dirty work for them.
supreme court judges in black robes and former lawyers.
at least they wear black got to give them that.
2--> Everybody can agree that federal program "X" is overfunded. Please detail what X is (and not just blank "Military Spending")
3--> The front-page tag line says that military spending is at a post WWII high. That's only true using certain metrics. While it's true that military spending is higher in inflation-adjusted dollars, the trend is much smaller if you go per capita. Further still, military spending is actually smaller today in terms of percentage of GDP. You should be skeptical any time someone tries to say spending is either higher or lower than WWII, because they are either ignorant or hiding facts.
Back in the early 1990s I did a study for about $20,000 that demonstrated that a key performance metric for a new Navy system was being overestimated by a factor of 50. Because the Navy and contractor wanted the system, they went ahead and spent nearly half a Billion dollars before canceling it. Guess what. The reason was that they were unable to get within a factor of 50 of the key metric.
If you talk to a thousand honest defense analysts (and there are certainly more than that) you will get thousands of additional tales of how the DoD loves to pour money down rat holes.