

Can the Defense Budget Shrink Without Risking National Security? - king-cobra
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/11/can-the-defense-budget-shrink-without-risking-national-security/281288/

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dasil003
> _As with civilian health care, savings are achievable here but face
> implacable opposition from military retirees. But as no less a military
> enthusiast than John McCain said last year on the Senate floor, “We are
> going to have to get serious about entitlements for the military just as we
> are going to have to get serious about entitlements for nonmilitary.”_

It makes me sick to my stomach thinking of beefing up military capacity while
cutting military medical benefits. How about this instead: you sent other
people's sons and daughters overseas to be maimed and killed, so now you
_fucking take care of them_.

The cost of health care needs to be factored into wars for 50-60 years
afterwards, not framing the conversation with the word "entitlements" to
subtly imply that ex soldiers are somehow taking more than they deserve.
Lumping military in with bloated public sector employee benefits is shameful.

~~~
6d0debc071
> It makes me sick to my stomach thinking of beefing up military capacity
> while cutting military medical benefits. How about this instead: you sent
> other people's sons and daughters overseas to be maimed and killed, so now
> you fucking take care of them.

Why? They're professionals, they knew the risks and accepted the gambles. It's
not like you went and conscripted a bunch of poor bastards, or tricked them
into it.

It seems to me you either believe that everyone deserves decent health
protection - in which case what you decide here has implications for how the
national system should run - or you don't. But being hired for soldiering
seems an odd point at which to digress from the general rule.

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maxerickson
In recent times, in the US, the benefits veterans receive are certainly
something they consider going in. Reducing those benefits pretty much turns it
into a trick.

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forgottenpaswrd
Today "Defense Budget" is an euphemism, it should be called "Attack Budget",
or "Ministry of War" budget, like it was in the past.

US is today the main aggressor in the world, what China an Russia are doing by
economic treaties, the US is using force alone. Afganistan, Iraq, Libia,
Siria.

US is trying to force people in the world to keep using the petrodollar, but
they had abused so much their power(printing it like crazy and exporting
inflation and poverty to other countries), that the rest of the world is
looking for alternatives, and they will find them.

All empires try to sustain past glories by force, from the Spanish empire in
Nederlands to British Empire in India, Germany(France) and Japan(in China)
before WWII. But empires come and go.

~~~
mtgx
It's sad that so many people don't even realize that US wants to "maintain the
peace" by _going to war_. It's basically the same excuse that's been used by
empires for millennia.

There could be so many solutions that could be used to cure the _root cause_
of attacks against US, but most of them are completely unacceptable to the
people running the military in US, and the MIC. Their solution is always _war_
and _destroying_ those that oppose them (even if that "solution" creates even
more problems in the long term for the security of US).

It's the same problem with the NSA, which is run by an _army general_ , who
just happens to be not-amusingly nicknamed "Emperor Alexander". Instead of
thinking that in order to make the Internet infrastructure in US _secure by
default_ (including banks, and whatever institution they tend to use in their
arguments), they think that they need to _have access to everything_
themselves, through loopholes, and they say that's what will keep the US
infrastructure safe - when in fact they're just making it less secure. But
that's okay, because it just means they get to ask for "bigger budgets to fix
it", just like the military gets to ask for bigger budgets, after they create
more terrorists with drone assassinations, double taps, and signature strikes.

~~~
joyeuse6701
Most empires don't start out that way. In many cases those nations were abused
prior, or invaded. Usually while maintaining a shell of a military. What they
learned by experience is...If you don't want someone to take a shot at you,
kill you, pillage the village, and rape your women, more or less hell on
earth, you have to crush everyone. This is axiomatic because of human nature.
Someone somewhere will not play ball and be civil. Someone somewhere will
cause massive damage to you and your livelihood if you give them the chance.
You may not have met them, but they certainly exist.

There is wisdom in this laconic phrase: Si vis pacem, para bellum

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larksimian
You could probably wipe the whole US military excepting the nuclear program
and not have to worry about anything except an internal coup
d'etat/assassination spree initiated by the mostly useless
contractors/generals that get fired as a result.

Does the nation run the army or does the army and its assorted industrial
parasites run the nation? I doubt anyone in Washington has the testicular
fortitude to find out.

Criticism: "B-b-b-but you can't use nukes to put down internal rebellions(1)
or bring liberty to the oppressed nations of the world(2)!!"

Response to 1: "That's what the police+national guard is for."

Response to 2: "Damn fucking straight."

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icebraining
So what would you do if a country with nuclear capabilities started attacking
the US with conventional forces?

 _Yes, Prime Minister_ has a funny scene about the nuclear deterrent:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX_d_vMKswE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX_d_vMKswE)

~~~
larksimian
Nuke their conventional forces. They're coming by sea, right? Here, let's be
hyper-paranoid and hang on to the drones and about half of the Air Force. It's
still more than enough to wipe out any aggressive force before it can make
landfall.

This isn't the Middle Ages where pansy nobles played at war and had dinner
together in between having their peasants butcher each other. If the US and
Russia were to go to war it wouldn't be an honorable clash and if our tanks
beat their tanks and our planes beat their planes well gosh darnit guess they
give up Siberia.

Here's a thought experiment: if India _didn 't_ have a strong conventional
force in Kashmir and just threatened to use nukes on Pakistan if they invaded,
would Pakistan call them on it? And if the Indians did toss a nuke, would
Pakistan really respond and invite a few dozen others?

Of course it plays better with the population to have war once in a while.
Gives the illusion of change, drives a narrative and so on. But I doubt most
major decision makers are crazy enough to risk prolonged nuclear exchange.

The lesson I take from that video is maybe slightly different: Why go to war
with the Soviets at all? Would my life as a British/US citizen be better with
Gorbachev/the USSR in charge or would it be better after a prolonged nuclear
exchange or would it be better after a decade of conventional World War 3?

Freedom and independence are overrated and not being dead, starving and at war
are underrated by modern societies to a staggering extent.

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vannevar
I would go further and suggest that not only would national security _not_
suffer by cutting the military budget, _it could actually be improved._ Much
of our military deployment around the world is like an insurance policy that
costs more over time than the event it attempts to insure against. Not only
that, military spending has a lost opportunity cost; it may be that our
national security actually depends more on education than on weapons, in which
case some proportion of the defense money we're spending is _detracting_ from
security, not improving it.

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melling
This is a good article about trying to increase the Pentagon's efficiency. Of
course, we're getting many typical extreme left comments on HN. It probably
also worth discussing how to actually improve the organization so that it does
run leaner and how to make contractors more accountable.

This is probably the main point:

"Fortunately, there are ways to cut defense spending without hurting military
capabilities. Besides maintaining its war-fighting capability, DoD, like any
entity, maintains a back-office bureaucracy to oversee its business functions.
That overhead accounts for roughly 40 percent of its budget. It’s hard to
compare different industries, or even government agencies, but one examination
of 25 industries showed average overhead rates ranging from 13 to 50 percent,
with the average across all industries being 25 percent. A RAND study of
overhead and administration costs among defense contractors found them to be
“tremendous drivers” of weapon costs at 35 percent. The largest domestic
programs—Social Security and Medicare—get by with costs in the single-digits."

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rdl
You could probably cut defense by 10% relatively easily without hurting
capabilities, if you actually had buy-in from the pentagon, rather than them
trying to make the most visibly painful cuts to get it reversed.

I actually think we could cut by 50-75% over time and receive the same net
benefits, by changing force structure, reducing "optional" missions like going
to war in Iraq, and fixing the acquisitions process. You would be reducing
capabilities at that point, but not in ways which hurt national security. It
would take a while due to retirement and medical obligations.

I'd be willing to listen to someone who wanted to cut 90% ultimately. That
would require fundamentally recasting the US military as a wholely domestic
force, with a much slower reaction time to new threats, but might ultimately
be preferable if the world becomes more peaceful.

~~~
mtgx
Eventually people will come around to Ron Paul's ideas for the military
spending and military policy. Hopefully there will still be trustworthy
presidential candidate with integrity that will be able to "charge ahead" with
such a policy, when most people are "ready" for it, and don't buy the typical
MIC line, that if even $1 is cut from the military's budget, the terrorists
will win.

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RexRollman
I sometimes wonder if the real issue isn't security so much as no one wants to
admit an uneasy truth: the US is in decline and can no longer afford its
military power.

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Zigurd
It is even worse: The US has been in decline for decades and military and
"homeland security" spending is used to mask decline and juice-up economic
statistics.

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Zigurd
To have to pose the question that way is disturbingly timid. Who doesn't see
that the US spends at least 10X what it would take to deter anyone from even
thinking about building a credible military threat.

The incredible expense of our recent wars illustrates why this is true: It
takes so much money to move a modern force across an ocean and keep them
supplied when there is zero attempt to interdict supply lines that it would be
astronomically expensive to invade any nation across an ocean if they could
put up any threat at all to supply lines.

Our military spending militarizes American society. Police are militarized. We
think we have an uptick in manufacturing but if you subtracted out the
military manufacturing we would have very little productive manufacturing. We
don't realize just how huge a dead weight we are carrying in jobs and capex
that produce zero gain in our standard of living.

Cutting military spending, and building an economy that delivers credible
performance numbers without that empty unproductive spending is the economic
priority of our age.

~~~
joyeuse6701
Then again, it only takes one, relatively small attack, like 9/11 to break the
fragile minds of the market and instill fear in the people. Now there's a
great loss in capital. Having said that, to build a credible military threat
would essentially require a joint strike force against the U.S. Before that
gets written off, stranger things have happened in the last 100 years.

Having said that, I do believe a lot of money could be better allocated
outside and within the military. That is to say, I think we should aim to get
more from less. I'd like to point my finger at government contracting
overhead, I think the financial belt could be cinched quite a bit.

~~~
Zigurd
Lay out the narrative. Is there a threat that would emerge before all our
soldiers are on pension and all our weapons are museum pieces? If not, why be
incremental about restructuring?

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gruseom
Counterexample to Betteridge!

