The US Defense budget can be reduced with resources reallocated if only there weren’t so much institutional failure like previous guy claiming he increased that budget while withdrawing forces from combat areas. Aside from his incompetence, it was in his final days, mainly an attempt to marshal forces supporting his 2021 military coup.
Fifty-seven percent of voters supported cutting the defense budget by 10 percent if funding was reallocated to the CDC and other more pressing domestic needs. Only 25 percent of people opposed the cut, that means more than twice as many people support an over $70 billion cut to our defense budget than don't, a 2:1 ratio.
lee.house.gov/…
The real reason that U.S. military spending is so high is not the threats it meets but the ambitions it serves. The primacy strategy of global military dominance fails to guide choices among military responses to danger. Because primacy sees threats and prescribes forces almost everywhere, it offers little basis for budgetary limits or prioritization. In that sense, it is less a strategy than a justification for expansive military ambitions. At a minimum, it endorses the present size of the U.S. military, with units permanently deployed in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East, various training missions, and global naval patrols.
A strategy of restraint, by contrast, would husband U.S. power and focus planning on actual threats. By keeping U.S. forces out of avoidable troubles, restraint would reduce the number of wars the Pentagon must plan to fight, allowing big reductions in military spending. A less busy military could be a smaller and cheaper one.
Cuts guided by restraint would save far more than those offered by the most popular method of reducing spending, which is to target “waste, fraud, and abuse.” The latter approach objects less to U.S. military ambitions than to the Pentagon’s inefficiency in pursuing them. It recommends savings via managerial reforms — acquisition reforms, improved financial management, and empowering civilian technocrats to eliminate programs that seem redundant.
The problem with that approach is that the spending it targets is a chimera. Everyone opposes “waste.” But attempts to find it reveal that nearly every military program does something and creates a political constituency who swear that the nation’s security requires its full funding. The Pentagon surely spends too much buying weapons, but the trouble is rarely sneaky contractors or rules that fail to control them, so much as satisfying those who rule over acquisitions: military leaders load in requirements to serve their service’s goals, and members of congressional defense committees defend the contracts that employ their constituents. Achieving real Pentagon savings requires having fewer goals and taking on the special interests dependent on the associated spending.
A second alternative approach to cuts is the “Nike” way, in which you “just do it,” lowering the total and letting the Pentagon sort out the details. That is essentially the approach that the White House and congressional leadership inadvertently selected by agreeing to spending caps while asking the Pentagon to do everything it had been doing. One virtue of legislated future caps is that they lock in future Congresses. The difficulty of overcoming the status quo protects the cuts. This method also has the advantage of being the most doable; it is easier to agree on cutting spending than on a strategic rationale for doing so.
In theory, budgetary restraint can drive efficiency and strategic restraint. Heightened resource constraints encourage service leaders to squeeze overhead costs more than instructions to find fat. Spending constraints also require more prioritization among goals, which is the essence of strategic planning. Particularly when interservice competition occurs, budgetary pressure can cause the services to debate priorities and offer alternatives to policymakers looking to limit objectives and save money. The Navy, for example, in promoting offshore methods of meeting threats, might highlight the risks of deploying U.S. ground forces to confront them and note the advantages of carrier-based airpower over land-based fighters.
The strategic and Nike methods of cutting the budget could be fruitfully combined. Restraint, in the sense of having fewer allies and wars, is possible without budget cuts; but in the absence of fiscal pressure to adjust, restraint would likely be little more than a slogan used by those doing the same old things. By articulating a strategy of restraint, imposing lower caps, and encouraging interservice competition, leaders could get the best of both approaches.
www.downsizinggovernment.org/…
Table 1. Proposed Military Spending Cuts (2017)
Ground Forces
- Reduce active-duty Army end-strength to 360,000 or fewer soldiers.
- Reduce active-duty Marine Corps end-strength to 145,000 or fewer.
- Cap the Army Reserves at 165,000 soldiers.
- Reduce the Army National Guard to 290,000 soldiers.
- Reduce the Special Operations Command to 40,000.
- Reduce operations and personnel costs to match cuts in ground combat units.
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Navy and Air Force
- Reduce the number of carriers and associated air groups to eight.
- Retire at least three amphibious assault ships.
- Cease production of the littoral combat ship.
- End the F-35 program and buy less advanced fighter aircraft instead.
- Accelerate the shrinkage of the attack submarine force.
- Reduce the Air Force tactical aircraft fleet by at least a third.
- Reduce operations and personnel costs to match reduced force size.
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Nuclear Weapons
- Limit bombers and fighter aircraft to conventional (nonnuclear) missions.
- Retire intercontinental ballistic missiles.
- Cancel the new nuclear-armed cruise missile.
- Cancel upgrades to the B-61 gravity bomb.
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Administration
- Consolidate geographic combatant commands and overseas bases.
- Reduce three- and four-star commands.
- Reduce associated contracting and civilian personnel.
- Reform maintenance and supply systems.
- Cut spending on intelligence and missile defense.
- Adopt more cost-controlling reforms for military compensation.
- Pursue further base realignments and closures at home and abroad.
- Cut most Overseas Contingency Operations funding; leave only what is actually necessary to conduct the air campaign against the Islamic State.
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www.downsizinggovernment.org/...
There’s no shortage of suggested budget cutting proposals
(2013) 10 Ways to Cut the Military Budget by 25 to 50% US military spending is somewhere from $700 billion annually (a 100% increase in the last decade) to over a trillion dollars when you add in interest payments from past wars, nuclear power weapons, intelligence gathering, Veteran benefits, Homeland Security and more. It represents more than half of the discretionary spending in the federal budget and half of the world military spending. The first step in making cuts in the 25 to 50% range it to refocus our military spending from being the world's policemen to the traditional approach of nonintervention and defending against invasion. (2013).
1. Audit the Pentagon – Up to 33% unjustified
2. Focus on defending U.S. rather than policing the world – up to $100 billion per year
3. Use government employees rather than outside contractors – up to $100 billion per year. Add to that outright contractor fraud, which some critics contend runs as high as $100 billion a year. Cutting these contracts by 15% would save $37 billion annually.
4. Bring all our military contractors home from non-essential bases for example, in the Middle East
5. Reduce the size and cost of military's back office bureaucracy - $80 billion per year.
6. Reduce our nuclear weapons arsenal - $35 billion per year.
7. Stop spending 10s of billions of dollars on weapon systems that don’t work - $13 billion per year
8. The military should stop duplicating existing government and private programs like health care, recreation centers and grocery stores - $9 billion per year Ten percent of the Pentagon’s non-war budget—$53 billion—goes to health care.
9. Stop spending American tax dollars to defend Japan, Europe and S. Korea – over $3 billion per year.
10. Stop spending 10s of billions of dollars on weapon systems that are not needed a form of corporate welfare. Many immediately mothballed upon completion.