Can the Defense Budget Shrink Without Risking National Security?

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/11/can-the-defense-budget-shrink-without-risking-national-security/281288/



Every municipal police and fire department has mastered the oldest bureaucratic budget maneuver in the book: If told to cut your budget slightly, don’t eliminate unneeded positions, buy less fancy office furniture, or delay buying new cars and equipment.

Just announce the closure of an entire police or fire station.

As the Chicago Tribune reported not long ago, "'Everybody on the City Council is in favor of facilities consolidation until they start to talk about the police station in their neighborhood,’ said Ald. Ricardo Munoz, 22nd, who added that he would fight attempts to close the station in his ward.”

Since protecting citizens’ lives is the first duty of government, public-safety functions are usually the last to feel the effects of tightened budgets. This is especially true at the federal level, where cuts to the defense budget are generally portrayed as assaults on the nation’s very existence. There are a variety of reasons to tread softly on any sort of defense cuts: You only get to err by under-defending the country once. The battlefield edge today, and even more so in the future is a product of advanced—and expensive—technologies. Those who put their lives on the line for the rest of us deserve the best equipment and protective gear, and the most reasonable pay and benefits, that we can afford.

But does that mean that we cannot cut the defense budget without short-changing national security? To hear some tell it the answer is “no.” But the Defense Department is part of the same government that most Americans abjure for its inefficiency, waste, and fraud. In fact, you can find just about everything that’s wrong with government in the defense budget. Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn, no liberal, has derided the Pentagon as the “Department of Everything” for its wide-ranging activities.

[Warren Stupidity]

1. It could be cut in half twice and we would still be spending more than any other nation.

[MANative]

2. By at least 15% without any substantial effect on security.

My brother is a Senior Project Director at the DoD and has said, as recently as four months ago, that his department regularly pads their budget by up to 18%. Since he's a RWNJ, he thinks that's just fine.

[RC]

3. It can be cut back at least 80%, if not more, by just actually defending only THIS country.

The Chinese and Russian "defense budget" would not be as large as they are, except for us, the United States threatening their interests militarily.
There is no need for us, U.S. to have bases in any other country. There is no need for the drone program. There is no need for us to be supplying guns, ammunition and other war toys to other countries. There is little need for the NSA. This just perpetuates the perceived "need" for us to continue "policing" the world, to "Keep the Peace". What peace? War seems to follow wherever we go.
If this country is the greatest country in the world, then why don't we pay attention to what is happening to this country, its infrastructure and the people living here? Why don't we put our people first, as do most of the rest of the civilized world?
If we would stop fermenting war and discontent around the world, the world itself, would be a more peaceful place.
Karma dude, it is real.

[Chan790]

10. Actually the drone program is a huge money saver...just one that DoD undermined.

The sale point on drones wasn't better performance or reduces service-member combat fatalities (though it provides both)...it was reduction of orders for aircraft. Ten drones (over the 20-year lifetime of the plane they replace) fully eliminate the necessity of purchase of one plane designed to fly those same missions and the drones do it at about 30% of the cost. The drones are more versatile even...the same drone model that is used in Pakistan to kill warlords is dual-purposed domestically (by non-military federal agencies) to precision deliver flame retardants in fire control, monitor developing storms and document demographic data such as traffic patterns. (All of which allow plane replacement at nearly 1:1 ratios as the loss-rate for drones in these uses are negligible and where the non-military planes cost 3-5x what the drones do.)

Where DoD screwed the taxpayers is they used that argument to buy the drones...then they kept buying the planes that they have no intention of ever using, in order to keep Lockheed Martin and Pratt & Whitney employed between orders of planes they do still need.

[RC]

11. You totally missed the point.

In a rational, sane world there is no need for the drone program in the first place. Nor is there any need to have military bases anywhere, except in this country. The MIC and their friends in the Pentagon, are working overtime to make sure we do not live in a rational, sane world.

[Chan790]

12. No. I just do not believe that is in any way "a rational, sane world."

Frankly, that strikes me as a likely far more anarchic, violent world--one likely to be wracked by global war driven by competing micro-interests; multiple substantial terrorist international factions; and pandemic classist, sectarian and ideological violence the primary victims of which will be as they are now: the global poor. It's a much worse world than we have now.

It's the same error of assessment that pacifists typically make--to assume that this or any nation's global interests (and mark it, every nation has global interests expansive beyond their own borders whether one wishes to acknowledge them or not) can be effected purely through diplomacy, isolationism and cooperativism.

We may not be enthused by the globalist scale of US militarism, but it's folly to believe it unnecessary...the only reason much of Western-aligned Europe is able to focus the majority of its energy and resources domestically is because the US is largely effecting their global interests as well, in so far as those interests align with our own. The question is not whether US militarism is necessary, those that believe it is not have been thankfully marginalized out of relevance, but whether it has devolved into a utility monster and the hammer on hand to fit all nails in need of a budget-haircut and the imposition of control it has long resisted.

[Bob Jones]

13. 95% would be more like it, but 80% is a good start.

[on point]

4. By at least 50% = right direction. Status quo = wrong direction. Got it Dems?

[winter is coming]

5. Has it occurred to them that if we stopped throwing our weight around militarily,

fewer people would be motivated to attack us? We have way more military than we "need", and end up using it to justify having it... and also to justify buying more more more from defense contractors.

[MisterP]

8. but that's using real-world logic, not corpo or warmonger

[99Forever]

6. Yes.

Drastically. And it would IMPROVE security when the sane people on this planet begin to NOT see us an empirical bully throwing our weight around.

[LuvNewcastle]

7. Cut off the MIC welfare queens. Let's take half of the DoD's budget

and put people to work fixing bridges and roads, update electric and communications lines, and save Social Security and Medicare. We could make America better and Americans happier. Maybe we could start spreading money around more instead of funneling all of it to the wealthy.

[Taitertots]

9. Our excessive military spending IS risking national security

And damaging our economy.