You Know, All This 'Wolf at the Door' and 'Hollow Force' talk is about

[unhappycamper]

a lousy 5% military budget cut. Five lousy percent.

All this blathering by the DoD is over a five fucking percent budget cut. Why does a five percent budget cut cause a trillion dollar a year organization to trot out apocalyptic warnings? The costs of both the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations were supplied by Emergency Supplementals, aka the National Credit Card. (The National Credit Card goes directly our National Debt.)

Military hardware is really expensive. The Navy's ship building program illustrates some of the costs.

Littoral Combat Ships were supposed to have costed $200 million dollars a pop. LCS#1 came in at $584 million dollars. LCS#2 came in at $704 million dollars. What do our congresscritters do? Order 20 more.

Virginia-class submarines cost $5 ~ $7 billion dollars each. (I think we've cut the building schedule to one a year.)

Zumwalt-class destroyers cost at least $5 billion dollars each. We're building three of them. Just for comparison, Aegis-class destroyers cost $1.8 billion dollars each.

My favorite Navy ship-building program is the new $40 billion dollar USS Gerald R Ford. Previous Nimitz-class aircraft carriers came in at $4.5 billion dollars sans people, aircraft and the rest of the carrier task force.

The Air Force likes go fast machines. The F-22 costs $44+ million dollars a pop (we own either 186 or 187 of them.) The not-ready-for-prime-time F-35 goes for around $247 million dollars (we already own 187 of them.). C-17 cargo aircraft cost $317 million dollars each. The RQ-145 stealth drone costs at least $200 million dollars each.

Back to my original point: the DoD is whining about a lousy five percent budget cut.

Suck it up, Dudes.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

1. You are aware that DoD civilians are looking at 20% cut for the rest of the fiscal year

Next year is still TBD and that SecDef is calling for a new BRAC round? There are already force reduction cuts announced for next year.

[unhappycamper]

2. I am and would suggest the DoD stop buying EXPENSIVE stuff. n/t

[ProgressiveProfessor]

3. Which also has impacts through out a mostly unionized workforce

I agree with cutting it back, but these cuts are too big a leap, especially in the last half of the FY.

3% cut a year in actual dollars on a FY2010 baseline, not what is in the FYDP and having to eat any inflation would be a better approach.

These cuts have some real human impacts that many are ignoring while pointing to carriers, jets, and tanks. The discussion alone is already causing economic slowdown in some areas. It would most like kill the budget progress CA has made as an example.

[unhappycamper]

4. Well, we need to drastically slow down our war $$$.

The MIC has spread out defense contracts to all 50 states to insure we would not be cutting their budget.

For five lousy percent, I'm all for:

a) dumping the LCS program
b) dumping the F-35 program
c) dumping the USS Gerald R Ford
d) stop buying a submarine a year
e) getting a fucking audit able DoD computer system
f) getting out of Afghanistan
g) getting out of the world policeman gig
f) dumping the Osprey program
g) stopping paying 72% of NATO costs in Afghainstan

[Victor_c3]

5. I read a real interesting article in the JAN-FEB issue of "Foreign Affairs"

This is mostly geared towards your point "g" about us being world policemen.

Unfortunately it is a pay-to-view subscription and I can't post a link, but the major gist of the article was that our excessive military spending encourages our allies to decrease their own military spending. While we spend nearly 5% of our GDP on military spending, Japan and Germany spend roughly 1-1.8% of their GDP on their militaries.

Japan recently has been playing around with China over some disputed islands. If they didn't have us standing behind them, do you think that Japan would be poking around with China over these uninhabited islands? Vietnam and the Philippines are also playing around with their own territory disputes with China in the South China sea. If any of these disputes escalate, we could easily find ourselves getting drawn into a conflict that we don't really need anything to do with. In effect our excessive military spending and our alliances of convenience (i.e alliance with any country other than China in the region solely because they are against China) is allowing some smaller nations to become larger players than they should be and could lead to more instability in the world as a result.

The same holds true with the Republic of Georgia and there recent pushes with the Russians. If they didn't have the US military in their back pockets, do you think that they would have been pushing the Russians like they did?

So yes, I completely agree with you over cutting ourselves out of the world policeman gig (and the rest of your points too).

[unhappycamper]

6. Correction on the F-22 cost: $417 million a pop n/t