A simple way to reduce the federal budget deficit.

Great Debates
41

If you want to reduce military spending, I’m cool with that. I even agree. I just think it’s a shit poor idea to do it in the manner outlined in the OP.

I think we need to re-evaluate our current military structure, sure. Do we need 11 carrier groups, each with the ability to project as much power as a large, modern nations military anywhere in the world?

I don’t know – but how much does it cost us, and what are the benefits? For instance, can some of these ships work double duty in situations like Haiti?

I do think that some places, like Japan & Germany, need to have forces withdrawn unless reason can be shown that they need to say, like South Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan – and as much as I was, and am, against the wars… We broke, now we’ve gotta fix it.

Long term, gradual scaling back of the military, with a stronger emphasis on small, elite strike teams and a large, well trained reserve (that can double as a ‘defensive militia,’) seem in order to me. However, a 90% reduction seems ridiculous.

Why? Because, sure, we spend more than 50% of the world’s expenses in Military might, but… we’re also 23% of the world GDP (I think that’s the correct number, right?). So, we’re spending roughly double what’s necessary, if we assume everyone spends an equal portion of their production as military might.

However, even this needs some explanation – the USA doesn’t have to defend itself in the way Germany has to defend itself, or Turkey has to defend itself. The USA requires a strong Navy for coastal defense, and since it has relatively close relations with Canada and Mexico, doesn’t need border defense. But, if a military incursion would happen, it needs to be able to counter attack, and to do that it either needs to be able to move masses of troops quickly from within the US or have troops positioned strategically outside of the USA.

Both of these tactics are viable, but the latter is the one we’ve used over the last 50 years. We positioned bases and allies strategically around Western Europe in order to fortify the Iron Curtain, and to defend against the “Red Threat.” It seems obvious at this point that that is no longer necessary. So we can scale back those bases, at minimum. But even the job of removing those bases costs money.

You have to offer early retirement to the personnel, or re-assign them, and pay to remove all of the classified (and non-classified, for that matter) equipment – after all, who has a good relationship with their landlord after they’ve broken a lease and left all their shit?

See, this isn’t as simple as just “Stop paying for shit.”

42

Over the last 4 years, our force strength has gone up about 65k in the Army, 27k in USMC, and gone down 28k in the Navy and 20k in the Air Force (note I was rounding there - I couldn’t get the table to copy into the web form right).
We’re at 1.4m at the end of 2010, down from about 2.7m before Vietnam, just over 2m in 1989, and about steady state 1.5m since 1994 on out.

43

Why not just pay the wages of all the defense contractors and armed services peeps? It’s only a small fraction of the total we spend on defense. And how would cutting the defense budget start a world war?

44

Cutting the defense budget, in itself, isn’t what he’s saying would start the war.

He’s saying removing the Mutually Assured Destruction theory from play would.

45

Ok last post for awhile.

At the end of the day, you need to have a force that’s able to tackle whatever missions you want it to tackle. There are lots and lots of scenarios and OPLANs, most of them classified, that drive those numbers. The DOD doesn’t just ask for stuff for the sake of asking.

So, back to an earlier post: you want to be able to protect Taiwan? There’s an app for that, so to speak, and it will cost you x dollars. Same with all the other scenarios here.

So to be clear, it’s not that there isn’t fat to trim. It’s that, if you do it, you have to know what major contingency operations you’re now giving up the ability to fight. I don’t think it’s as simple as, if we disarm then everyone will like us, that our strength gives the bad guys motivation, look at Japan, etc.

46

Pay them to do nothing, when the goal is to reduce the deficit? :confused:
Where do I sign up to not-work for a paycheck?

I didn’t say it would. I said eliminating our submarines would lay the groundwork for WWIII. Without them, in theory, it is possible to neutralize our nuclear weapons with a first strike.

47

The OP generally is on your side of the aisle, but nice try.

Those allies rely on our spending in part to subsidize their own. Let’s have a look at Britain, France and Japan.

The Japan Air Self-Defense force mostly operates American aircraft. Their primary air superiority fighters are the F-15 and Mitbushi F-2, which is a partly homegrown version of the F-16. Think they’d be able to design, build and operate those without the massive American investment in R & D which led to their development?

The Royal Navy currently operates four Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines. They carry American Trident II ballistic nuclear missiles with homegrown warheads. Every British nuclear delivery system since 1962 has been either American-developed or based on an American design. Similarly, Britain chose to participate in the Joint Strike Fighter (now F-35) program, to take advantage of existing American stealth technology. Britain will underwrite about 10% of the cost of the F-35 program, but benefit as much from it as the US (except in terms of job creation).

France is a bit of a special case. From 1966 to 2008 it was officially a member of NATO, but was represented only on political councils and retained total control of its armed forces. The other members of NATO (including the US) have always submitted to partial control of their armed forces by the officers of other member states - the Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, for example, who has always been an American officer. France could withdraw from full NATO participation again at any time. Even the fiercely independent French use American equipment - Hercules transports and KC-135 fuel tankers, for example.

American defense spending is not and has never been solely American spending.

Now, I think a 50% defense cut is reasonable; we don’t need 11 aircraft carriers when nobody else is even thinking about operating more than three. A 90% cut? Not so much.

This is true. It’s not like we’d shut down 90% of operations overnight - after all, we’ve already spent the money on most of the next 10 years’ worth of equipment, so we’d just be cutting salary at first - less than one fifth of our defense budget.

Right, but if we weren’t spending so much on being able to kick ass, we wouldn’t have to worry about bringing our pilots home safely because we wouldn’t be sending them out in the first place.

There are drones on the Mexican border?

48

Let’s just use even numbers, and reduce the military by 100%. Congratulations, you’ve just reduced the federal deficit for 2010 to ‘only’ 1 trillion.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601070&sid=aZnNekhkN0cY

49

We could pay them to do nothing or pay them to do something constructive. Either way the money they get paid is only a fraction of the defense budget. We can keep enough nukes to blow the world up a dozen times over, a bunch of submarines and pay everybody their wages and still cut the defense budget by well over 50%. Bring in a single-payer healthcare system as well and all of a sudden we’d have a huge budget surplus.

50

What kind of weird math are you using?

The military isn’t the sole deficit generator for the United States.

And how do you respond to a very tiny military incursion? Say, the Iraqi’s attacking Kuwait?

Do nothing, right? And what about, after they’ve attacked, they blow up the US Embassy? Do nothing, or do we nuke them for attacking sovereign US Soil?

Edit: Obviously completely theoretical.

51

Jeez, I hope that wasn’t classified…

52

If we are not willing to use our military in a traditional Machiavellian way, for example: take Iraq’s oil for the next 100 years to pay for the war, subsidize our economy, and break the back of OPEC, then we should just reduce the size of our military.

I hate the idea of the USA being the world’s police force. Either acquire resources with our overwhelming military strength, or reduce our force strength. We don’t need to be in 130 countries. We don’t need to pay to have other countries resent us.

Bring our troops home. Guard our borders. Rebuild our infrastructure.

53

Because the OP specifically mentioned submarines, and I was a U.S. submarine officer once upon a time, I’ll chime in.

Others have already mentioned the fact that ballistic missile submarines are the sole platforms most likely to survive a first-strike nuclear attack. The whole rationale for MAD and a credible nuclear deterrent is to ensure that an enemy is confident that he cannot take out a significant fraction of our nuclear forces. Air Force missiles sit in their silos in known locations, and bombers sit on runways and air bases. Submarines at sea cannot easily be located, much less destroyed by any potential adversaries.

As far as attack submarines go, realize how devastating the relatively crude WWI and WWII era submarines and U-Boats were in past conflicts. The U.S. is a maritime nation. Much of our trade is shipped to and from overseas ports. Without a strong Navy, hostile nations could blockade or disrupt this shipping, and the easiest way to disrupt shipping is with submarines. Finally, the best way to defend against a hostile submarine is with another submarine.

In a real no-holds barred shooting war, surface warships would last about 15 minutes. Between supersonic anti-ship missiles, maritime nukes, and enemy submarines, any surface ship floating is a sitting duck.

Based on our location in the world and our neighbors, the U.S. has little to fear with respect to a land invasion. It is far more important to protect our maritime trade, and defend against an (unlikely) invasion by sea. People forget that the U.S. actually used to build coastal defense gun batteries to defend our coasts. With our Navy and our submarine force, any potential belligerents would never make it to our shores in the first place.

With all that being said, I think that the size of our military could be reduced. I also think that money could be saved by taking a hard look at military salaries. While I think that anybody getting shot at should be well compensated with increased combat pay, there are a lot of people in our military serving their time and getting paid far more than is warranted. Between bonuses, untaxed allowances, and superb benefits, military personnel are very well-compensated–too well compensated, IMHO. I left the service eight years ago, and took a drastic pay cut, even taking a job as an engineer. Correcting for inflation, I didn’t actually catch up to my military salary until this year. Looking at current military pay rates, I see that they have increased at a faster rate than that of inflation since I got out.

Finally, I think that it is far too easy to go to war today. Congress needs to take back its power to decide whether or not our country goes to war. We have wasted an ungodly amount of money in the useless war in Iraq, IMHO.

54

I think The Hamster King is largely on target. I can’t say how much of our military should be pared, but there are some programs that almost everyone acknowledges to be boondoggles. (And, I may be wrong, but I’ve inferred the only reason for developing 5th-generation fighter jets is to defend against the 4th-generation fighter jets that we’ve sold to no-longer-so-friendly regimes!)

What amused me in this thread is that the first one to point out that government military spending is stimulative was a “fiscal conservative” whose premise is that government spending is not stimulative. Perhaps the distinction is between Demo spending and GOP spending. The most intelligent “fiscal conservatives” like to parade their knowledge that spending on deliberately “broken windows” is not productive. I guess useless planes are OK, because their windows aren’t actually broken. :smiley:

55

And WWIII, unfortunately, I doubt Saddam would have stopped with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Regards,
Shodan

56

If we can’t cut it, how about freeze it for 10 years?

57

Hell, freeze everything and see if we can grow our way out of the deficit. Freezing just defense wouldn’t do it - we have to freeze growth in the places where the crash is coming - entitlements. Unfortunately, that won’t happen.

Regards,
Shodan

58

A better solution would be to rotate the troops back home and station them on the border to shoot people trying to cross illegally. It will cut down on both the problem of illegal immigrants sucking down the USA’s social services and drug smuggling.

59

Weren’t you a nuclear technician? I suspect your salary may not have been representative of the military as a whole.

60

People can (and do) use this logic to argue against any cuts in any government program. If components of the military are useless then cut them and live with the temporary consequences. There are entire departments in the federal government that could be shut down tomorrow without any effect on any of our lives (minus the job loss) but I don’t think the military is one of these. I’m sure there are a lot of cuts that could be made within the military but I would be opposed to any that would weaken our military might.