Letter to commission on defense spending
This letter via Counterpunch to the Deficit Commission makes a clear statement on broad issues of accountability for the DoD, our contracting system, and the huge drain on our resources. Reading the whole letter points to examples of problems, and how the current system has reached and will reach unsustainable levels of spending.
We are writing to you and other members of the President’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform as individuals who have worked in national security affairs for decades for the Department of Defense, in the Armed Forces and for Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Our concern is the defense budget.
Similar to what your “Co-Chairs’ Proposal” said last week regarding Social Security and other issues, we do not believe that defense spending should be reduced to a bargaining chip in budget negotiations at the Deficit Commission. On the other hand, we do believe that the defense budget is dangerously bloated, giving rise to serious decay in our armed forces.
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Despite Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ efforts to cancel or redo several weapon programs that were over cost and under-performing, the number of major defense acquisition programs has changed from 91 programs costing $1.6 trillion to 87 programs costing $1.6 trillion. As you know, Secretary Gates has also imposed a plan on the DOD bureaucracy to transfer internally $102 billion dollars over 5 years, but there is no net savings to help the deficit.Instead, Secretary Gates wants the DOD budget to grow one percent per year plus inflation for the next 10 years. That would increase the base DOD budget from $554 in 2010 to $735 billion in 2020 – a 33 percent increase, not including any spending for the wars against terrorism. While the Co-Chairs’ Proposal seeks a number of terminations, reductions, and efficiencies beyond the Gates’ plan (many of them welcome and overdue, but some that we believe require major modification), both the Co-Chairs Proposal and the Gates’ plan project into the future a defense program that is essentially the same as that we have today, simply at different spending levels. Under either plan, the size and modernity of our forces will continue to shrink and age, even if all remaining programs are implemented without any cost increases or schedule delays.
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Without a jolt, without radically altered incentives, the bureaucratic system that thrives on corrupted, unaudited accounts cannot and will not change. A colleague of yours on the Deficit Commission, Senator Tom Coburn, R-OK, has written to you recommending the urgently required accounting changes, together with a new and strong incentive: the DOD budget should be frozen at current (2010) spending levels until it can pass comprehensive audits of all of its programs, agencies, and contractors.
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All this is inextricably interwoven with our present wars. If – after our withdrawal from Iraq, Afghanistan and similar adventures, an increasingly inevitable consequence of impending bankruptcy – we simply default to the Pentagon’s military and civilian bureaucracies, allowing them to continue business as usual by just shrinking presently planned forces, it would be an enormous tragedy for the American people and for all those in uniform. Your support of constructive, thoughtful use of reduced budget levels and audited spending figures can make possible truly fundamental reform, reform that reorients our national military strategy to more prudently balance national ends against national means.
Good luck. Personally, I think it’s a waste of time thinking these old fuddy duddy’s will consider such a radical thinking course of action.
While the civil service unions are busted, why not bust the socialized war industries?
What Christie, Sprey, Spinney say…….
Fear and loathing sell weapons, patriotism is subsumed in militarism, PAC’s wield excess rents from war industries to get more of the nation’s resources. The US military is not organized for any imminent threat. It exists due to unwarranted infleunce wielded to keep the war profits flowing.
The US Army order of battle is defined by combat brigades, organized as subsets of tradition WW II divisions, 3 or 4 brigades to a division, however they deploy separately to the outposts of the empire. In Europe and other occupied (in WW II) territory the brigades are permanent establishments.
In the world today the US army can reduce half the combat brigades and keep the existing number of national guard brigades. That and shuttering the occupations would reduce the US Army take by 60%.
The Navy is organized in deployed fleets. The 5th Fleet in Bahrain should be pulled out to show dismay at the facissts in charge there and disbanded. End forward deployments, close the occupation bases and cut US Navy by 70%. Think real hard about keeping nuclear subs at sea.
The USAF has attack capacities that are 4 times too huge and transport capacities that are useless. Cut USAF to 20%.
By the time a rational order of battle is determined the US DoD should get $190B in 2012 not $643B (including $90B for the occupations).
Oh the good socialized jobs………………
“The global size of the derivatives bubble which was calculated last year at USD 190k per person-on-planet, has risen to USD 206k per person-on-planet. The ever rising commitment of governments for the repeated bailouts of financial institutions is partially linked to various flavours of derivatives exposure settlements and “black hole” losses emanating from off-balance-sheet vehicles.”
Indeed, the entire GDP of every single country in the world only amounts to around $60 trillion. How can we ever hope to pay off $1,400 trillion dollars?
We can’t and we won’t. The only way that this $1.4 Quadrillion mountain of debt will disappear is a total and complete collapse of the global economy and its replacement with a new financial system.
Whether that also simultaneously brings down the US dollar and the United States itself as a first world country remains to be seen, but anyone who believes that a few years of austerity can redress the balance is living in cloud cuckoo land.
Once the whole charade starts to unravel, the scenes we saw in Cairo over the last few weeks will look like a walk in the park in comparison to the turmoil that awaits as a result of the derivatives bubble.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/realism-on-defense-spending/
It would be informative to read the comments to Krugman at the link.
muros
i wonder. that Quadrillion dollars is not real money. It could disappear in the next market crash, hurting no one really. the people with that money in the stock market must know that it is not”real.” in any case they are not using it, except to “earn” more funny money.
true that when the market crashes the banks get scared and the brave capitalists get scared, but…
oh, dare i say it?… but, here is where government “stimulus” can save the day. doing what the capitalists do until the capitalists get over their fright. but that does NOT mean “bailing out” the capitalists, or cutting their taxes, or whatever damn stupid thing the Great Compromiser is told to do by his Wall Street Advisors (Non Parisan, tm)… but creating jobs and lending to small businesses.
try to remember “the economy” is only an illusion. real people have real needs and do real work with real tools. no reason to stop because “the economy” gets the vapors.
Debating with Paul Krugman:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/more-on-defense/
The war spending must be considered in context of the actual danger today (which is if you wish for perpetual war is growing at the same rate as the US GDP?) and is that danger equal to raising taxes, or taking food from hungry and clothing from the naked.
The factual, aside from the excuses to spend this part of GDP or what is going to entitlements, answer has been \”NO\” since 1992?
1. The chart shows that in comparison to GDP the military industrial complex has grown somewhat slower. Looking at % GDP is less logical than \”% of outlays\”, far more needs to be considered such as size and growth of GDP, reason for the size of the expenditures and impact on GDP of diverting resource from more productive use. The only reason to justify a spending plan is need and efficient response to the need, none of that comes up in the debate and looking at ratios to other spending or comparing to GDP is not useful. I looked at spending in constant dollars so as to see how much a $500M Lexington Class aircraft carrier costs in context of a $14B Ford class, those dollars being then year. You cannot figure how much hedonic inflation, over blown requirement, inefficiency and waste is going into the % GDP in any data set for war spending during peace time.
2. I cannot argue the source of how one estimates GDP and ratio. Just a point in the 80’s CIA consistently over stated part of GDP Soviets \”spent\” on war to make Reagan’s spending more pallatable.
3. How can you justify throwing money away on failed weapons like F-35 and sta wars and use GDP? How much conscience is assuaged when looking at what is taken from the mouths of hungry children to pay for the generals’ armoured divisions and fighters turning hydrocarbons into smokre and noise to train for nothing? When will liberals say enough? Ike said some of this in 1953.
4. Sometime in the 08 or 09 time frame perpetual war created well over 4% of aggregate demand. None of it paid for. Let’s see how Obama does getting the war profiteers’ take cut back.
Looking at GDP only tells you whether war is a growth industry. War is not an industry, it is only good to keep the enemy away and there is no enemy for the US’ war power.
The current US order of battle consisting of convention weapons is too large, and too capital intensive based on 11 aircraft carriers, hundreds of various sized bombers, a few thousand fighters, a dozen or so equivalent divisions of armoured, mechanized and amphibious technolnogies that no other nation even dabbles in.
The conventional force is designed to fight a \”peer\” force which does not exist. The obvious peer of the current US are the German army 1943, and the Imperial Japanese Navy 1942.
The conventional force is sized to fight 2 and a fraction wars about the size of Vietnam each, whether there is any one there to fight those.
The nuclear force is unmatched in the world and its main competitors are UK and France. While its potential adversaries hold very few assets.
Thinking of sustaining perpetual war in terms of GDP makes it easy to say, we spent then why not spend it now.
GDP is no good.
This just in by way of Friends’ Committee on National Legislation.
“As the House of Representatives prepared to vote on legislation that would cut most federal government spending this year back to the level of 2008, while allowing Pentagon spending to continue to grow, Representative Pete Stark’s amendment would have insisted that the Department of Defense budget also be reduced to 2008 levels.
The good news is that 76 members of Congress – including both Republicans and Democrats – have now gone on record in favor of Pentagon spending cuts. Enter your zip code to find out how your representative voted and then send a letter expressing your opinion.”
Way to go Tea Party, or is is war party?
Dan,
That’s a good letter. This addresses another aspect of the problem with appropriations provided to the U.S. Department of Defense. I expect that similar situations apply on a smaller scale may apply in other departments of the U.S. Government. The Department of Energy might be such an example.
I also recommend a careful read of the Fred Kaplan artilcle that Paul Krugman cited in his blog post which ilsm cited upthread. http://www.slate.com/id/2243297/pagenum/all/#p2 Kaplan has written a number of articles on DoD since SecDEF Gates took control. Others are well worth the read as well.
Bear in mind the closing statements that Krugman made in his blog post: “But if we’re talking about fiscal issues, you have to bear the arithmetic in mind. We’re not living in the 1950s, when defense was half the federal budget. Even a drastic cut in military spending wouldn’t release enough money to offset more than a small fraction of the projected rise in health care costs. So by all means, let’s try to crack down on the massive waste that goes on in matters military. But doing so would be of only modest help on the larger budget problem.”
The US is going the way of the Soviets, and is going something like theSoviets did in Afghanistan, too.
Check out Clinton on unemployment from DeLong: http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2011/01/28/view-from-davos-how-would-clinton-create-jobs/
The interesting point is the US needs to borrow dollars accumulated by our suppliers (like the suppliers to the Soviets in the 1970-80s) to pay for the wars, SS is paid by you and me.
Then the Tea (Republican Soviet) party decides to keep pillaging the US to borrow from China for the militarists’ adventure in Afghanistan a militarism the Soviet tea partiers will not pay for, and votes to keep spending on the war machine with borrowed Chinese greenback. No new taxes and no idea of making the war pay-go. No tariffs because it is ideologically better to borrow from the Chicom than tariff them, for outlays needing cash.
This just in by way of Friends’ Committee on National Legislation.
“As the House of Representatives prepared to vote on legislation that would cut most federal government spending this year back to the level of 2008, while allowing Pentagon spending to continue to grow, Representative Pete Stark’s amendment would have insisted that the Department of Defense budget also be reduced to 2008 levels.
The good news is that 76 members of Congress – including both Republicans and Democrats – have now gone on record in favor of Pentagon spending cuts. Enter your zip code to find out how your representative voted and then send a letter expressing your opinion.”
Way to go Republican Soviet Tea Party, or is is war party?
ilsm
i agree with you in principle, but you need to be a little careful with the rhetoric or you will lose credibility with the people you need to reach. starving children is a bit over the top. when the defense budget was being cut, there were serious losses of work … don’t know if any children actually starved then, but a lot of engineers lost their smugness.
i hate to say this, but winding down defense spending would take some careful planning. of course, we can’t have a “planned economy,” so the only way to avoid the post war recession is to keep building for the next war. this last sentence is meant to be ironic. but of course it is history.
50,000,000 US citizen without access to health care/insurance, nutrition program cut for war, the solution to deficits increased poverty in the elderly; I do not think any laid of defense worker will be that badly off compared to those whose jobs are now in India and China.
Where I grew we had a lot of aerospace plants. In the late 60’s we had a lot of engineers pumping gas. However, they had been well paid and their pay had made a lot of other priorities get left behind.
In the early 90’s when the peace dividend from GHW Bush and Clinton cuts were being felt the region had not encouraged the amount of aerospace and did not fare badly.
Yes, there are places where unemployment and redevelopment would be needed but the benefit to the US is better than NAFTA which caused far more jobs loses.
Batiste and Seymour Melman showed the cuts would create more jobs that would be lost.
Only thing long term down is war profiteering and US backing killings around the world.
ilsm
as you know i agree with you mostly. just worried about the effect of the rhetoric, and thinking of the need to cut the military AND plan for replacing it as the source of jobs and, gasp, innovation in our great free enterprise system.
The Defense budget will increase 1% per year plus inflation???
Let’s yoke their “inflation” to the fake, doctored CPI which says inflation is 2%.
Don’t let them stick you with cost overruns for explosive 2010 inflation in raw materials like
Iron & Steel 13.6%
Crude Oil 14.1%
Platinum 20.7%
Copper 32%
Cotton 91%
Good Luck in the trenches – the country you save may be your own
Werster
inflation or not, why would we want to increase the “real” budget 1% per year.
the Social Security budget is projected to increase one half of one tenth of one percent per year and they are screaming about that… Trillions of $ of unfunded deficit… crushing burden on the young.
sad to say, most people don’t understand the difference between 1% and one half of one tenth of one percent. or what the money is paying for.
besides
MIke Boskin will tell you that is “better” cotton, so it’s not really inflation.