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On October 23 2021 00:39 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On October 23 2021 00:03 maybenexttime wrote:On October 22 2021 22:48 LegalLord wrote:
I mean, budgets are commonly assessed in terms of 10-year impact and $3.5T is not something that we should add to the bottom line without giving it some serious thought, maybe trying to find the money elsewhere to balance the budget. The opposition by Munchkin might be contrived but the only way that you can ignore the debt like that is if you subscribe to the Monetary Magical Thinking theory.
Maybe it's worth it, maybe not, but there's nothing disingenuous in calling it $3.5T when the passage of this bill increases debt obligations by $3.5T over the standard time that you assess budgetary impact. It's Magic Money Tree. Much Money - Trillions! Show nested quote +On October 22 2021 23:09 Zambrah wrote:
Its disingenuous in that the military budget isnt talked about in ten year terms, most probably because itd be a hell of a lot more eyebrow raising to say, "7.5 trillion dollar military budget approved!" as opposed to "750 billion dollar military budget approved!" its a great marketing tactic to make sure that the military budget looks a lot less disgustingly hefty than it is. I mean, a 10-year budget impact assessment is normal. A lot of individual military programs are assessed that way, even if the NDAA allocation is annual. Not to say we couldn't or shouldn't cut down on the military budget though. New programs are partially useful (good R&D anyways) partially wasteful; things like healthcare for veterans or many of the active deployments are pure waste. But the answer is to cut down on expenditures on the military front, rather than use it as cover to spend infinite money elsewhere.
My position has generally been that we could cut down to a third or a quarter of what we dump into our military, and that money could go directly to all manner of beneficial programs. We know we spend an unconscionable amount of money on the military, so we don't present the cost over ten years like with every other big federal program, and we beat the big nationalist drum to make people think it's critical to our identity as Americans, so it never comes into popular question. Such a shame, really.
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Redirecting defense spending to domestic programs has the potential to do a lot of immediate-term good to social stability and the like. Externally, who else will benefit from such a dramatic shift? I'm fully aware of the plentiful terrible crap the U.S. has done overseas in the name of freedom and the like, but I shudder at the thought of what examples we will be able to come up with for certain other countries in the future when they fill the role the U.S. is largely playing at present.
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On October 23 2021 09:15 micronesia wrote:
Redirecting defense spending to domestic programs has the potential to do a lot of immediate-term good to social stability and the like. Externally, who else will benefit from such a dramatic shift? I'm fully aware of the plentiful terrible crap the U.S. has done overseas in the name of freedom and the like, but I shudder at the thought of what examples we will be able to come up with for certain other countries in the future when they fill the role the U.S. is largely playing at present. An organisation as big as the US military will have horrendous waste, especially when Congress keeps shoving them more money then they themselves are asking for.
A reduction in defence spending does not have to impact the US's ability to project power at all.
What was it, the US spends more on the military then the next 10 countries combined? Something tells me the US can do the same its been doing with less.
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On October 23 2021 00:39 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On October 23 2021 00:03 maybenexttime wrote:On October 22 2021 22:48 LegalLord wrote:
I mean, budgets are commonly assessed in terms of 10-year impact and $3.5T is not something that we should add to the bottom line without giving it some serious thought, maybe trying to find the money elsewhere to balance the budget. The opposition by Munchkin might be contrived but the only way that you can ignore the debt like that is if you subscribe to the Monetary Magical Thinking theory.
Maybe it's worth it, maybe not, but there's nothing disingenuous in calling it $3.5T when the passage of this bill increases debt obligations by $3.5T over the standard time that you assess budgetary impact. It's Magic Money Tree. Much Money - Trillions! Show nested quote +On October 22 2021 23:09 Zambrah wrote:
Its disingenuous in that the military budget isnt talked about in ten year terms, most probably because itd be a hell of a lot more eyebrow raising to say, "7.5 trillion dollar military budget approved!" as opposed to "750 billion dollar military budget approved!" its a great marketing tactic to make sure that the military budget looks a lot less disgustingly hefty than it is. I mean, a 10-year budget impact assessment is normal. A lot of individual military programs are assessed that way, even if the NDAA allocation is annual. Not to say we couldn't or shouldn't cut down on the military budget though. New programs are partially useful (good R&D anyways) partially wasteful; things like healthcare for veterans or many of the active deployments are pure waste. But the answer is to cut down on expenditures on the military front, rather than use it as cover to spend infinite money elsewhere.
That bold part is a fucking joke. As a veteran that got cancer treatment through the VA, for free, it was not a waste. It could be done better, but to call it a waste is a fucking joke.
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On October 23 2021 09:19 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On October 23 2021 09:15 micronesia wrote:
Redirecting defense spending to domestic programs has the potential to do a lot of immediate-term good to social stability and the like. Externally, who else will benefit from such a dramatic shift? I'm fully aware of the plentiful terrible crap the U.S. has done overseas in the name of freedom and the like, but I shudder at the thought of what examples we will be able to come up with for certain other countries in the future when they fill the role the U.S. is largely playing at present. An organisation as big as the US military will have horrendous waste, especially when Congress keeps shoving them more money then they themselves are asking for. A reduction in defence spending does not have to impact the US's ability to project power at all. What was it, the US spends more on the military then the next 10 countries combined? Something tells me the US can do the same its been doing with less.
I fully agree there is wasteful spending and ways where that can be reigned in while still fulfilling the mission are desirable. I got the sense from the recent discussion though that there's a near consensus here that it would be adequate to take an axe rather than a scalpel to the military budget. One issue is that's it's not actually easy to effectively trim that budget.
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On October 23 2021 09:19 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On October 23 2021 09:15 micronesia wrote:
Redirecting defense spending to domestic programs has the potential to do a lot of immediate-term good to social stability and the like. Externally, who else will benefit from such a dramatic shift? I'm fully aware of the plentiful terrible crap the U.S. has done overseas in the name of freedom and the like, but I shudder at the thought of what examples we will be able to come up with for certain other countries in the future when they fill the role the U.S. is largely playing at present. An organisation as big as the US military will have horrendous waste, especially when Congress keeps shoving them more money then they themselves are asking for. A reduction in defence spending does not have to impact the US's ability to project power at all. What was it, the US spends more on the military then the next 10 countries combined? Something tells me the US can do the same its been doing with less.
Yeah only the US and China are in the triple digits (billions US dollars per year), at 778 and 252 respectively according to wikipedia. Surprisingly this is only 3.7% of our GDP though that's still above average. I still think it makes all the talk that "350 billion is too unconscionably large" pretty disingenuous if looked at in context. Climate change is an existential threat whose enormity justifies spending on a scale that we do for other threats. Yet we have the Republican party and a literal coal baron to make sure that that can't happen. We'll still have to pay eventually but in addition to money it will be in lives and irreversible ecological damage as well.
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On October 23 2021 09:23 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On October 23 2021 00:39 LegalLord wrote:On October 23 2021 00:03 maybenexttime wrote:On October 22 2021 22:48 LegalLord wrote:
I mean, budgets are commonly assessed in terms of 10-year impact and $3.5T is not something that we should add to the bottom line without giving it some serious thought, maybe trying to find the money elsewhere to balance the budget. The opposition by Munchkin might be contrived but the only way that you can ignore the debt like that is if you subscribe to the Monetary Magical Thinking theory.
Maybe it's worth it, maybe not, but there's nothing disingenuous in calling it $3.5T when the passage of this bill increases debt obligations by $3.5T over the standard time that you assess budgetary impact. It's Magic Money Tree. Much Money - Trillions! On October 22 2021 23:09 Zambrah wrote:
Its disingenuous in that the military budget isnt talked about in ten year terms, most probably because itd be a hell of a lot more eyebrow raising to say, "7.5 trillion dollar military budget approved!" as opposed to "750 billion dollar military budget approved!" its a great marketing tactic to make sure that the military budget looks a lot less disgustingly hefty than it is. I mean, a 10-year budget impact assessment is normal. A lot of individual military programs are assessed that way, even if the NDAA allocation is annual. Not to say we couldn't or shouldn't cut down on the military budget though. New programs are partially useful (good R&D anyways) partially wasteful; things like healthcare for veterans or many of the active deployments are pure waste. But the answer is to cut down on expenditures on the military front, rather than use it as cover to spend infinite money elsewhere. That bold part is a fucking joke. As a veteran that got cancer treatment through the VA, for free, it was not a waste. It could be done better, but to call it a waste is a fucking joke.
I think the point of it being a joke is that if we just gave everyone the same treatment we gave the VA we wouldn't need a VA.
That was my takeaway, but I could be wrong
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On October 23 2021 09:32 micronesia wrote:Show nested quote +On October 23 2021 09:19 Gorsameth wrote:On October 23 2021 09:15 micronesia wrote:
Redirecting defense spending to domestic programs has the potential to do a lot of immediate-term good to social stability and the like. Externally, who else will benefit from such a dramatic shift? I'm fully aware of the plentiful terrible crap the U.S. has done overseas in the name of freedom and the like, but I shudder at the thought of what examples we will be able to come up with for certain other countries in the future when they fill the role the U.S. is largely playing at present. An organisation as big as the US military will have horrendous waste, especially when Congress keeps shoving them more money then they themselves are asking for. A reduction in defence spending does not have to impact the US's ability to project power at all. What was it, the US spends more on the military then the next 10 countries combined? Something tells me the US can do the same its been doing with less. I fully agree there is wasteful spending and ways where that can be reigned in while still fulfilling the mission are desirable. I got the sense from the recent discussion though that there's a near consensus here that it would be adequate to take an axe rather than a scalpel to the military budget. One issue is that's it's not actually easy to effectively trim that budget.
The military cant keep adequate track of itself and, either axe or scalpel is going to need to remove an axe's worth of funding.
Army, Navy, Marines, and the Air Force all failed their financial audit in 2019. These organizations can't keep track of their finances or their assets, until they start they should get serious budget cuts and have to re-justify all of the money they receive and actually bother to keep track of it all.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/01/opinion/sunday/pentagon-spending-audit-failed.html
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On October 23 2021 13:21 Zambrah wrote:Show nested quote +On October 23 2021 09:32 micronesia wrote:On October 23 2021 09:19 Gorsameth wrote:On October 23 2021 09:15 micronesia wrote:
Redirecting defense spending to domestic programs has the potential to do a lot of immediate-term good to social stability and the like. Externally, who else will benefit from such a dramatic shift? I'm fully aware of the plentiful terrible crap the U.S. has done overseas in the name of freedom and the like, but I shudder at the thought of what examples we will be able to come up with for certain other countries in the future when they fill the role the U.S. is largely playing at present. An organisation as big as the US military will have horrendous waste, especially when Congress keeps shoving them more money then they themselves are asking for. A reduction in defence spending does not have to impact the US's ability to project power at all. What was it, the US spends more on the military then the next 10 countries combined? Something tells me the US can do the same its been doing with less. I fully agree there is wasteful spending and ways where that can be reigned in while still fulfilling the mission are desirable. I got the sense from the recent discussion though that there's a near consensus here that it would be adequate to take an axe rather than a scalpel to the military budget. One issue is that's it's not actually easy to effectively trim that budget. The military cant keep adequate track of itself and, either axe or scalpel is going to need to remove an axe's worth of funding. Army, Navy, Marines, and the Air Force all failed their financial audit in 2019. These organizations can't keep track of their finances or their assets, until they start they should get serious budget cuts and have to re-justify all of the money they receive and actually bother to keep track of it all. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/01/opinion/sunday/pentagon-spending-audit-failed.html
I can't read the article through the paywall but I don't agree with the part in red/bold for two reasons. First, their mission is important, and will suffer greatly with sudden severe budget cuts. Secondly, if they really can't keep track of their finances, that also means they can't distribute the budget decreases effectively and will do even more harm than necessary. As I suggested above, this problem needs to be solved carefully rather than suddenly and dramatically. I don't think enough has been done towards this effort, but that article suggests people are finally looking.
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Yeah, I would never pretend or claim that I would know how and where to cut waste in our military, just that ultimately there is a lot of it. It's important to at least talk about it when folks wring their hands about how we're gonna pay for anything that improves the lives of Americans who have to work for a living. Our government is more than capable of coming up with the money when it matters to them, which is something more people should be aware of.
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On October 23 2021 23:17 NewSunshine wrote:
Yeah, I would never pretend or claim that I would know how and where to cut waste in our military, just that ultimately there is a lot of it. It's important to at least talk about it when folks wring their hands about how we're gonna pay for anything that improves the lives of Americans who have to work for a living. Our government is more than capable of coming up with the money when it matters to them, which is something more people should be aware of.
The easiest thing to do with regards to cutting the military budget is to take an in-depth look at the critical missions that they are involved in and what they need in order to be successful executing that mission. This would take the form of peace keeping duties and having whatever materiel is necessary for QRF as needed. Seeing as we have better equipment than the majority of the world, a lot of waste of manufacturing new equipment can probably be cut down. The weapons systems currently being used are decades old but still very functional. They can be upgraded as a last resort.
Also, a lot of the weaponry and gear is passed between the various organizations (Marines get leftovers from just about every branch) so that also eliminates a lot of wasteful spending on new gear. Second, they need to determine the exact amount of personnel needed to maintain a good standing army/force. By closing some bases in various countries, they can lower the costs it incurs for shipping people to remote areas where they aren't needed and keep materiel at home. This would also reduce a lot of the clutter that goes on as it is almost impossible to keep track of a couple hundred thousand people when it isn't very necessary to do so. QRF's need to be placed in strategic countries but they also have more than enough capability to get people wherever they need to be fairly quickly.
Along with that, they can look at how they go about procuring resources from companies that only waste time and money and filter out those with a long history of overshooting budgets and timelines. This effectively forces a lot of companies to either get in line or fall out completely. Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, etc will have to streamline their efforts in order to maintain that cushy DOD spending they get or be at risk of losing contracts. R&D should be selective what the future contingencies may include but also not getting a dozen Boston Dynamic robot dogs. The USAF doesn't need more F-19 jets. The Army doesn't need more humvees and tanks, etc. By eliminating wasteful and redundant operations and materiel, they can cut back on a lot.
I can't give you a number but 25-33% can probably be cut from spending and the US would still have the strongest force on the planet easily.
Edit for clarity.
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$200 billion a year on VA by 2019 as well - and rapidly growing (looking like $235B in 2021). Definitely one of the prime places to look for money being wasted, even more so than the "easy target" major defense contractors known for bloat.
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Being an engineer who has worked in and with some of those big defense companies, there is absolutely a big bloat problem there, too. Tightening that up would lower our military overhead like whoa. It would take some pretty serious oversight to overhaul everything at this point, tho, a lot of careers by now are built on a system that's used to running over budgets and deadlines.
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On October 24 2021 02:20 NewSunshine wrote:
Being an engineer who has worked in and with some of those big defense companies, there is absolutely a big bloat problem there, too. Tightening that up would lower our military overhead like whoa. It would take some pretty serious oversight to overhaul everything at this point, tho, a lot of careers by now are built on a system that's used to running over budgets and deadlines.
I've been an engineer on that side as well - and done my fair share of project management work in the same. While I don't disagree about there being bloat, I've seen a lot of the same things that micronesia mentioned over the past page or so that make it really difficult to just surgically remove that bloat. Anything along the lines of just squeezing margins to press contractors into reducing costs, the way that most people think will solve the problem, will work in the short term but lead to precipitous declines in quality in the long term. The fundamental problem there is that high tech equipment is actually pretty expensive to build, and the kind of competent people that you need to design and build said equipment are really hard to replace once you start letting them go to save money. It takes years to really stabilize after a big budget cutting effort like that, often with mass hiring initiatives that turn into "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" games because that's the only way you can staff up fast enough to meet the government's demands to try to catch up on troubled programs. Doing these two things in cycles is even worse, albeit common.
Indeed, if judging from my personal experience I would place the primary source of bloat on the lack of skill of program managers in the government agencies that lead to these kinds of decisions. The decisions make sense individually - show an over-budget program can save money by negotiating with the contractor and getting cheaper deliveries, show a behind-schedule can catch up even if we have to splurge to get it past the finish line - but are short-sighted in the long run. Combine that with often-questionable and poorly coordinated program requirements and you have contractors that look bloated to a large extent primarily because they do exactly what the government wants them to do. There's some undeniable self-enrichment in there, to be sure, but I wouldn't even put the brunt of the blame on the Lockheeds and Northrops for why they have so much bloat. I've seen too many different aerospace entities, large and small, become exactly the same thing to expect it to be anything other than the government.
But further than that, I don't expect that "solving the management problem" is either a reasonable objective nor is it going to really give you a scenario where you get everything you want and a cost that isn't objectionable. It won't be long before you reach the point where you start to realize that the way to a lower budget is to do less stuff, and cutting things from the program. And then you have to ask, what will that be? Recruit fewer personnel? Abandon a few bases? Reduce support to a major program (and should we make less F-35s, GPS satellites, or aircraft carriers)? All are workable, but have less visceral appeal than "reduce bloat" which sounds like a great something-for-nothing solution but in practice is deep-seated and less of the story than many would believe.
Although for all that, if you want to look for bloat, usually the best place to start is a program with rapidly rising costs and preferably nebulous benefit. Can't find a much better example of the same than the VA office.
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I say just cut the military budget in half and they'll find the bloat themselves.
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All the evidence I need to know there are probably plenty of areas to cut wasteful spending in the military is when Congress made the military spend billions on M-1 Abrams tanks that it didn't want or need.
https://www.businessinsider.com/congress-forcing-the-army-to-make-tanks-2012-10
The army chief of staff told Congress we have enough tanks, we don't need or want more tanks, and we have thousands sitting in the deserts of California/Nevada that we aren't using. I'm no military tactician but I don't think we even really use tanks anymore. The army also suggested that foreign sales would be enough to keep supply lines open, so if we did need them in the future we could produce more.
It's obviously nothing more than a jobs program and if you're going to have a jobs program it seems more logical to build roads/bridges than to build tanks to sit in the desert and collect dust.
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I do agree that members of Congress using their influence to control funding (directed towards their own districts/states) of military programs is a large part of the problem. The funding of the military is too politicized.
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On October 24 2021 04:55 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On October 24 2021 04:49 micronesia wrote:
I do agree that members of Congress using their influence to control funding (directed towards their own districts/states) of military programs is a large part of the problem. The funding of the military is too politicized. I cant remeber where I read this but isnt there multiple military companis who make their production spread out in many (or every state) even though its wildly inefficeient, but then everyone is scared to vote against them? The mix of money and politics in the US is way out of wack in so many areas.
Same problem when it comes to large NASA contracts. The SLS is a prime example out of the military handbook.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Funding_2
It has been a bad project for 10 years that just gets more money pumped into it.
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EPT
