This is bonkers. The VA is not defense spending. The State Department is not defense spending. The FBI is not defense spending (well, part of it is, but not in a way that’s relevant). NNSA is actually defense spending, but that’s included in the numbers I gave earlier. Go ask any VA, State, or FBI employee how they feel about the military funding they receive and they will laugh in your face as if you asked them how it feels to be making a million dollars a year.
The journalist who wrote that is factually wrong and should be corrected. She also made other factual errors, like that the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013 prohibited base closures. That legislation didn’t deal with that issue at all. And she also made statements that are clearly without context, like the hiring of civilians over the last few years has more to do with getting a cheaper Federal employee to do certain work rather than having a more expensive contractor do it.
I mean, basically you got an article written by a misinformed person, so I’ve already paid that article more attention than it deserves.
We learned in 1940 and 1941 that withdrawing behind out borders means:
Shipping, citizens, and allies are left exposed, and
Opponents can come right up to those borders and attack us (Pearl Harbor).
I’d much rather keep potential confrontations as far away as practicable. Sharing our umbrella wiht our allies is a bonus that really doesn’t cost us much.
Did the needle hurt? Of course the VA is a part of our costs when it comes to our defense, it’s not free, why shouldn’t it get directly tied to the defense budget when we are figuring all the costs involved?
You want bonkers, I suppose next, you’ll say, wars are not a part of defense either, that’s just bonkers. Guess what, they are not on the base figure either that often gets quoted, as quite a few sites point out including the Balance: Ironically, the DoD base budget does not include the cost of wars. That falls under Overseas Contingency Operations.
Because as a matter of law and practice, it isn’t part of military costs. Sure, there’s a intellectual connection, but the fact that you (and others) continue to find articles that are not from the Federal Government itself bears out that this is a connection that is being drawn by people involved with any of these matters in an informed capacity.
Is that really it? Where do you think their sources are coming from? Did you not see the DoD source that I know at least one link I provided showed? That’s where they are getting much of their information.
And the “irony” you quote is about as ironic as a black fly in one’s chardonnay. Irony is when the metaphorical meaning is inconsistent with the literal meaning. This is another point in which the author of the article is woefully misinformed: the base budget is literally defined as routine operations that are non-war spending items, and OCO is (supposed to be) all spending related to the war and not routine operations. It can’t be irony if a thing is being used for the reason it was created. (Not that OCO is beyond reproach, but the article is attempting to make a point that is completely wrong.)
No, I didn’t see any DoD source that showed that the VA is part of the military budget.
^^^, Aww, I see. When you buy a car you rely on the dealer that says the base cost was all it was going to be. The insurance, the payments, the interest on the loan, the maintenance, these are costs don’t count, they are freebies. Well, yeah, sort of, not really, or what do you tell the taxpayer on the true costs of the Defense? Just give 'em the base, tell him, it’s right there in the DoD, don’t go to the other government sites showing associated costs.
They list the DoD as well as the other federal agencies involved, in several of the sites I gave. You keep wanting to limit the associated costs, and not see other federal agencies and tax dollars that Americans are having to spend. They list them in the articles. The DoD doesn’t even include the war costs with the base number, but puts it aside in another. Which one is being more honest on true reflective costs of our defense? I guess you’ve answered, you want to stick with the base, and all other associated costs that go with it can’t be trusted, and really isn’t a part of our defense, not even the wars.
Your original article to your link was just a few concise paragraphs of which you thought that settled it, that’s all the defense costs annually. You don’t have to look behind the curtain if you don’t want to, if all the other associated costs that goes with the Defense upsets you. But go ahead, take just a peek, that’s where the devil finds his details.
What you’re not getting is that I know far more about the Federal budget than the article you cited, and I’m trying to show you that the author made factual errors that anyone who has a 101-level grasp of the subject would point out.
I think the problem is that the errors in the article appeal to you, and so rather than saying, “Oh, I see – yeah, that’s a good point” you actually repeat the erroneous statements, like that something is wrong with separating war costs from routine costs.
So let me bang my head against the wall one more time: there’s good reason why war costs are separated from routine (or “base”) costs. Because one day we will be out of these wars, and the defense budget should not be artificially inflated by the cost of the wars. For example, right now we are spending about $70 billion a year on war costs. Inshallah, we will get out of those wars soon. That $70 billion should not be “built in” to the base budget of the military because those costs OUGHT TO GO AWAY WHEN THE WAR IS OVER.
Merging those costs into the base budget would guarantee that the $70 billion will never go away, it would just be siphoned off into other spending on weapons or whatever.
Just to be clear since I wasn’t able to jump in yesterday. I found the site that Razncain found and didn’t have time to pull a better number so I ran with the 1T. Yes, the article was crap which is why I didn’t link to it.
I also immediately pulled it out as part of the reducing the total amount. So in his normal dodge Ravenman is making a big deal about a tiny part of my argument that didn’t matter. Though I found it funny that some one who knows so much about the federal budget didn’t know that DOD has a separate weapons development budget, nuclear budget and munitions budgets. I had to pull those from 2019 though which is why I used the 1T from the crap article I couldn’t find FY20 fast enough.
The majority of the savings come from closing out overseas operations this included stopping all OCO spending immediately and then not just closing bases but laying off all of the people stationed there. I didn’t grab a quote but it was mentioned that only 5B was spent on the bases for maintenance so the 150B wasn’t a real number. I don’t have time right now to list every fighter wing I’d shut down (thought I did mention the since carrier group) but dropping all of those solders is where the 100B comes from. I’d actually be shocked if the number was that low.
So we have a discussion about numbers which are pulled out of thin air, but when I criticize them as having no firm basis, I’m “making a dodge.” Yeah, that makes sense.
I’m curious why you think I didn’t know DoD had a “munitions budget.” Perhaps because I was correcting you that the “munitions budget” is a subset of the “weapons budget,” even though the term of art for all that spending is the “procurement budget.”
ETA: And DoD doesn’t really have a “nuclear weapons budget.” Their programs for the delivery systems are part of the larger procurement and R&D budgets, but an entirely different Federal agency is responsible for nuclear weapons themselves. But what do I know, I don’t write half-baked columns on the internet.
My mid-1970’s experience was a month-long REFORGER (REdeployment of FORces in GERmany) exercise. Each stateside unit had small crews tending equipment in Europe till personnel flew in… which took time. An actual emergency redeployment would have been dicey. Try to slow a full-scale Russkie invasion until relief forces arrive. Hope nobody fires nuclear rounds.
I suspect various entities would like to see US overseas bases shuttered. Who benefits?