House Liberals To Obama: Double Your Defense Cuts

[ProSense]

House Liberals To Obama: Double Your Defense Cuts

Four liberal House Democrats wrote a letter calling on President Barack Obama to roughly double the defense cuts his administration recently announced.

Democratic Reps. Barney Frank (MA), Lynn Woolsey (CA), Rush Holt (NJ) and Barbara Lee (CA) were the signatories.

“(W)e believe that the current overextension of United States forces overseas, and tremendous military advantage the United States holds over other countries…allows us to make much more substantial spending reductions than the $480 billion in cuts over ten years that you are proposing,” they wrote.

“We believe that savings in the vicinity of around $900 billion over ten years can be realized, and we will be working to build support in Congress this year for cuts along those lines, during the appropriations process and during the coming debate on sequestration.”

http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/updates/4809

That's doable if they combine the proposed cuts with those tied to sequestration, which would total about $1 trillion.

The changes are part of a broader effort by the Pentagon to decrease its projected spending by $487 billion over the next decade in accordance with a deficit-reduction deal President Obama reached with Congress in August.

Those cuts could soon swell substantially. If Obama and Congress cannot agree on another package of spending reductions or tax increases by next January, the Pentagon could be forced to slash an extra $600 billion over 10 years. “It basically takes a chain saw to the budget,” said Adm. James A. Winnefeld Jr., vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002229272

[msongs]

1. cut the parasite private contractors and let the soldiers help rebuild infrastructure nt

[gopiscrap]

2. Yes, I'd say

triple those cuts!!! and put half of it to social spending and mass transit!!!

[ProSense]

3. Kick! n/t

[exboyfil]

4. It would be more credible if specific cuts

were put on the table as a proposal.

For example take out 2-3 aircraft carrier groups - how much savings?
Cancel specific weapons programs
Bring troops home and downsize all branches
Tell Europe, Australia, Japan, S. Korea to come up w/more money to defend themselves
We need to get our defense spending to 2.5-3.0% of our GDP (not 4.7%)
Accelerate departure from Afghanistan
$60B/yr is hardly a chainsaw on nearly $500B/yr spending - more like a pruning shear.

Guys lets not lose track of the fact they we spend a trillion more than we take in every year. At some point the goods time are going to stop.

[DCKit]

5. Still, the military used to be self-sufficient jobs-wise.

Taking the private contractors (food, laundry, housing, electrified plumbing) out of the equation would likely provide a bigger savings than any other single thing we could do.

[exboyfil]

6. I don't know the details but what are the soldiers doing

instead of doing these functions? I have a tough time buying that you can get any savings by having additional soldiers do these functions. Our military now is composed of highly specialized/technical individuals. I am sure they spend a great deal of their time training and acquiring new skills.

Not saying that it is necessarily right. I guess I would like to hear from some folks in the military.

[kurt_cagle]

8. Soldiers and the Obama Doctrine

Remember that the Army Corps of Engineers is still made up of soldiers. What I foresee happening with the Obama doctrine is more of what you saw the night of the SOTU - cadres of highly trained special ops types for doing surgical strikes (not all necessarily good, unfortunately), and more trained as engineers, computer programmers, even carpenters and construction specialists. The Bush years were exceptional in that we saw a massive buildup of soldiers, people specifically trained for urban warfare, even as technical specialists saw only a fairly small buildup. A lot of those soldiers are going to be RIF'd - a process that's already well underway - and those that remain are going to be more like the soldier mix you had in the 90s where the role of the military was to perform specialized tasks, first, and training only secondarily as combat soldiers.

This actually makes more sense in today's world. As both Iraq and Afghanistan proved, invading and running a country's infrastructure in the face of a civil war (partially directed at you) is extraordinarily expense, and usually in the end counterproductive. The money we spent trying to "liberate" Iraq's oil could have bought a helluva lot of infrastucture here at home, could have paid for a massive upgrade of our educational and communications systems, could have gone into research and development for more efficient development of all of our resources locally. In the end, Iraq is a quasi-stable democracy that could easily revert to civil war tomorrow, Afghanistan will collapse back into tribal fiefdoms the moment that US presence there drops below a certain level, and the oil to come from Iraq may stave off oil collapse by only a decade or so. Indeed, about all that the Bush doctrine did was to absolutely certify that the US has no qualms about throwing its weight around and showing that militarily we're not that strong, despite the trillions of dollars poured into the coffers of the MIC contractors.

[DCKit]

9. When I was a private contractor for the gubmint...

the company I worked for was paid between three and five times my actual salary for my billable hours. Given that I was salaried and working 60-80 hours per week, they were making over $500K/year and paying me just over $60K. I expect it's much more lucrative for Halliburton, Brown and Root, Xe, etc.... I don't recall ever having worked on any "no-bid" contracts like those corporations do.

[kurt_cagle]

7. Yes, but ...

Don't get too carried away. Many of the ships in those carrier groups are approaching fifty years old, and the spending isn't on building new ACs, but on simply keeping the ones that are still in active service afloat.

There's also a significant reality that we face. Even as we develop alt-energy, at least for the foreseeable future a significant amount of energy we generate is still going to come from oil/ng/coal (and perhaps nuclear, though Fukushima may have taken that last one off the table). A smaller navy in particular will mean that we will need to develop those resources closer to home to make up the difference from withdrawing from the ME will cause. I'm not saying that a more isolationist stance isn't necessarily a bad thing (I think that it is in the long run the only realistic stand we can make) but a controlled step away from empire is something that will need to be done carefully and with a clear plan beforehand, because empires in freefall can get ugly.

Certainly getting the mil-contractors out of the game would make a big difference. I have worked for one (on an information technologies project) and it was astonishing the degree to which these contractors could turn a project from being maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars to being tens of millions, and of course if they deliver shoddy product then all they have to do is go to their captive congressmen and rattle how jobs would be lost in THEIR districts should an indictment (or even an investigation) move forward. Remarkable how quickly the head of an agency backs down when the committee chair that determines their appropriations gives them a call.

[exboyfil]

12. I worked for a contractor for six years and I honestly believe

we did a very good job for the government. Maybe I was low on the food chain, but I spent a considerable amount of time working with the bids and proposals, and I thought we were pretty lean in our bids given the expectations on the contract. I would never return to that life, but I felt good about what I accomplished. It was by far the funnest job I ever had.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

10. Europe, Australia etc are more than able to defend themselves.

The issue is how much of joint non-defensive military ventures they should be paying for.

In the case of things that are clearly America's wars, like Iraq and Afghanistan, I don't think you're going to get much luck getting the rest of the world to chip in.

(I'm not sure about Japanese defence capabilities?)

[lonestarnot]

11. K & R