Your proposal is, from what I can tell, based on some degree of envy you felt towards fellow soldiers while in service. It’s based on anecdote and ignorance. Your proposals would save money, but that does not make them good proposals. The amount saved would be trifling.
Every cut in our armed forces has a cost. Cut the Crusader self-propelled artillery program and you save about $12bn. What do you lose? You lose a self-propelled piece of artillery that was designed to be used in raging battles between us and the USSR in the event they decided to roll West into Europe. So basically we lost something we had no business throwing money into during the year 2002 in any case.
Institute the cuts you are proposing–I can’t say exactly how much they’ll save. I would bet substantial amounts of money it would be a small fraction of the money we saved by abandoning the Crusader system. What do we lose? Despite your claims, we would lose morale. We would have a more difficult time recruiting individuals, especially individuals who go into more technical and specialized MOSes. We’ll always be able to round up 11Bs but people that can do some of the more specialized stuff in the military will have no incentive at all to take a job that won’t give them any benefits for spouse or children when there are comparable civilian jobs out there, just won’t happen.
So there are several deeply flawed assumptions:
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This will save a lot of money. It won’t save a lot of money in the context of the DoD budget.
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This will have a desired impact on Army composition. No, it won’t. It will make recruiting more difficult, and especially more difficult to bring people with skillsets in certain highly technical or specialized MOSes–the individuals most equipped to succeed in the civilian labor force.
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This will not hurt morale. This will definitely hurt morale, and creates tons of problems. I was the CO of young men for over 20 years, and the last thing I would want to deal with is new guys coming in who get a girl pregnant and have to decide what’s the best way they can get out of their enlistment early so his family has the benefits they need.
If you want to save money in the military I’ve proposed ideas that are much more realistic and meaningful. They don’t destroy morale or give the Army endless personnel headaches and actually save real money instead of just “stick it to” whatever subgroup of enlisted men you served with pissed you off by “living too high on the hog.”
I proposed this in the past:
If you aren’t talking about stuff like that, you aren’t seriously talking about reducing our military spend.