One comment

• Kelly Starks

  February 10, 2011 at 1:50 pm

  Certainly Stephanie Gutmann’s ideas were lame. Realistically there’s been bipartisan agreement that the military has been underfunded for years. Hence why we lost troups deployed with no body armor, or deployed ni unarmored HumVees.

  Worse then that though is we’ve been putting off replacing old equipment. Gates has made that worse by:
  – Dropping replacement programs in work,
  – Continuously pushing the military to stop worrying about later – just focus on now;
  – and reassuring Congress that we’re so superior to everyone else in the world our current decades old equipment will be nearly invulnerable to (or at least far superior to) anything, anyone else could field for decades.

  The last bit was laughable and quickly proven false by what other nations started fielding – and so insulting to China that when Gate arrived for a visit recently, they announced a new generation fighter not only superior to our decades old ones – but to the new F-22 fighter Gates discontinued as unnecessary; as well as announced and displayed their new anti aircraft carrier missiles, whose only real target would be our aircraft carriers.

  Gates will leave his successor a huge “bow wave” of equipment needing immediate, simultaneous, replacement. Just like how after Jimmy Carter left office congress and the White House went on massive rushed programs to refit the “hollow military force”, expect the same to start in a year or two.

  The idea of cleaning the militaries bureaucratic inefficiency is a appealing and a good idea, but given we can’t even shut down bureaucracies like the Departments of agriculture and Education – even though they do virtually nothing at all – what chance have we have to do it with something like the far more complex DOD that really does do things were desperately want and need?

  Worse – for all the talk of military bloat, the vast bulk of the militaries budget is salaries and care of solders. Yes the US spends about as much no its military as the rest of the worlds militaries combined – but most of that goes to grossly underpaying, poorly housing, and giving decent medical care to its comparatively small numbers of troupes. Most of the rest of the worlds militaries “greatly economize” or eliminate, such costs.

  For example a new aircraft carrier and its planes and equipment cost about $10-$15 Billion, but the crews on them easily cost a billion a year in salary and support.