Battle heats up over Pentagon spending plans

[DonViejo]

BY REBECCA KHEEL - 03/21/21 08:00 AM EDT

Jockeying over defense funding is heating up amid expectations President Biden will request an essentially flat Pentagon budget for next year.

This past week, a group of progressive Democrats sent Biden a letter calling for him to “significantly” slash defense spending.

The letter sparked a fierce backlash from Republicans, who view defense cuts as a red line and would like to see the budget increase.

The back-and-forth points to a difficult balancing act the administration and Democrats will face when the budget works its way through a narrowly divided Congress.

more
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/544126-battle-heats-up-over-pentagon-spending-plans

[brewens]

1. Start with losing about half of the generals. Then root out anything that looks, sounds or stinks

like a white supremacist. Follow that up with firing all the independent contractors. Have the military go back to doing the jobs the contractors have taken over. That was always just a looting scam anyway.

[EX500rider]

2. "Follow that up with firing all the independent contractors."

Actually that will be considerably more expensive and significantly lower combat power.
Hiring a civilian to clean toilets at a base in Afghanistan requires much less expensive training then boot camp and you are not required to supply them with pensions and life long medical care as you do with troops. Having more troops assigned to support jobs will mean fewer available for combat.

It's not a particularly new trend either:
"In the Vietnam War, where U.S. troops were there for a long time, contractors were 16 percent of the force. In the Korean War civilians were 28 percent of the force. During World War II it was 12 percent, 4 percent in World War I, 17 percent during the U.S. Civil War, 15 percent during the Mexican-American War and during the Revolutionary War it was 18 percent."

[jalan48]

3. Big Defense Budgets are one of the few things Democrats and Republicans can agree on.