Second, your statement that contractors are a model of efficiency compared to "getting a soldier to do that stuff" is also untrue. Various figures have demonstrated that - so far - contracting out basic tasks such as cooking, maintaining housing and the like are much more expensive when contractor run than when run by the military. What you do get is a minimal increase in quality for a maximal increase in price. This is fairly intuitive: the contracts, risks and market that contractors take on in the private sector are far more generous to them and their employees than the monopoly of, essentially, slave labour who have no contracts and have to work 24/7 when ordered to do so. The price for the military doing those jobs has always been lower. The argument has always been that the quality will improve with contractors doing the job. The only way in which governments have argued that the price changes is in how it is represented on the books: paying a contractor over a set period is different to having to pay via the state today.
Two things:
1) I don't know about anybody else, but in my experience you can hardly call the increase in quality "minimal." I ate at both civilian-run and Army run dining facilities in Iraq...it was night and day. Same with laundry service...the quartermaster unit we had at one FOB was terrible compared to the civilians.
2) Contractor costs are fixed, and predictable. More or less. Whereas each soldier, the second he sets foot in country, gains a lifetime of benefits. And that only goes up if he gets injured (physically or mentally). Plus you get into retirement benefits for those that make a career of it, etc....if a Pakistani subcontractor's employee gets blown up, that cost is on the contractor. If a soldier gets blown up, the government has to pay out. And if he survives, the government gets to pay out a ton of money for a lifetime. Now, I'm not arguing that contractors are significantly cheaper; but the (high) cost is more predictable. Kind of like a new car costs a lot in payments, but nothing in maintenance...that older used car may wind up being much cheaper, or it may wind up costing you a bundle.
1) I don't know about anybody else, but in my experience you can hardly call the increase in quality "minimal." I ate at both civilian-run and Army run dining facilities in Iraq...it was night and day. Same with laundry service...the quartermaster unit we had at one FOB was terrible compared to the civilians.
This is where the UK and US experience may diverge. UK army chefs have always been known, and still are, for extremely good quality - I literally have no idea how they do it, but they do, and on a budget. The big contracted messes in Bastion, KAF and the like are noticably poorer quality, and work off the same basic logistic chain.
2) Contractor costs are fixed, and predictable. More or less. Whereas each soldier, the second he sets foot in country, gains a lifetime of benefits. And that only goes up if he gets injured (physically or mentally). Plus you get into retirement benefits for those that make a career of it, etc....if a Pakistani subcontractor's employee gets blown up, that cost is on the contractor. If a soldier gets blown up, the government has to pay out. And if he survives, the government gets to pay out a ton of money for a lifetime. Now, I'm not arguing that contractors are significantly cheaper; but the (high) cost is more predictable. Kind of like a new car costs a lot in payments, but nothing in maintenance...that older used car may wind up being much cheaper, or it may wind up costing you a bundle.
Fair enough. Except as we both know, the risk for either soldiers or contractors at the major base locations (i.e. the only places where contractors work, and therefore this is an issue) is really pretty low. Yes, contractors costs are fixed, but I don't think the unpredictability of a military chef or laundryman being blown up in the middle of KAF justifies the extra expense that contractors incur, because not enough chefs or laundrymen get blown up.
If we were hiring contracted infantrymen, perhaps, but that isn't the argument (private security companies aside).
I hope the military isn't paying too much for medical benefits, because in my experience the medical benefits are extremely low quality, and often so difficult to access (up to and including simply being flat out punished or discharged for accessing healthcare) that people simply avoid any contact with their supposed medical benefits.
On the submarine we had a full time corpsman who had only two jobs, the first (and most important) was doing mountains of paperwork on rad health nonsense so Navy Nuclear can continue to convince a paranoid public that they aren't constantly irradiating the public (they aren't, and have never been) the second was to ensure that no one was able to see a doctor if he could damn well help it.
And if someone managed to talk their way through him to a doctor, there was a full-time doctor up at squadron employed by Naval Undersea Medical whose sole job was to ensure that no one with the submarine designator was able to receive healthcare.
If you managed to talk your way past him he would attempt to have you submarine disqualified shortly thereafter as punishment, regardless of whether or not the actual doctors cleared you for submarine duty.
With so few people able to throttle healthcare access for so many down to a trickle, I have to wonder just how expensive those medical benefits really are.
I imagine that they are quite overstated, and the money is really being blown on something other than actual health services.
What the fuck is that shit it doesn't even make sense. You spend all that time and those resources training people to make the billion-dollar thing somewhat worth its cost and then you keep those people away from healthcare?
I hope the military isn't paying too much for medical benefits, because in my experience the medical benefits are extremely low quality, and often so difficult to access (up to and including simply being flat out punished or discharged for accessing healthcare) that people simply avoid any contact with their supposed medical benefits.
On the submarine we had a full time corpsman who had only two jobs, the first (and most important) was doing mountains of paperwork on rad health nonsense so Navy Nuclear can continue to convince a paranoid public that they aren't constantly irradiating the public (they aren't, and have never been) the second was to ensure that no one was able to see a doctor if he could damn well help it.
And if someone managed to talk their way through him to a doctor, there was a full-time doctor up at squadron employed by Naval Undersea Medical whose sole job was to ensure that no one with the submarine designator was able to receive healthcare.
If you managed to talk your way past him he would attempt to have you submarine disqualified shortly thereafter as punishment, regardless of whether or not the actual doctors cleared you for submarine duty.
With so few people able to throttle healthcare access for so many down to a trickle, I have to wonder just how expensive those medical benefits really are.
I imagine that they are quite overstated, and the money is really being blown on something other than actual health services.
Ha. It wasn't quite that bad in the Army, but it was bad. I mean, you have a full-fledged hospital on every post and sometimes I think that (aside from training sites) those are there almost entirely for families. Because soldiers are afraid to use them. And for good reason...my go-to story is sitting next to my buddy, who I had driven to the ER, while he waited for about half-an hour to be seen for a chainsaw injury. Like, he had lost control of a chainsaw with a faulty safety, and it had chopped up both is legs. No permanent damage, mind you, but tons of blood loss...meanwhile, an adorable little girl with a sniffle went in ahead of him.
Because what the fuck does Joe need to see a doctor for m i rite? Here's some Tylenol, man the fuck up.
However, hate to break it to you but I suspect that these benefits still manage to be quite expensive.
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Dr Mario KartGames DealerAustin, TXRegistered Userregular
edited September 2010
The VA is the highest rated (satisfaction), with social security being second and the completely private system being last.
The VA is separate from the care active duty members receive. More importantly veterans are often in a very different cultural and work environment when using the VA.
The military budget around here has gotten pretty extreme, but I'm wary of cutting the R&D portion of it. It's really, really hard to get the government to spend money on science at any level, and military R&D is actually one of the few excuses we have to invent new shit.
Ideally we'd be able to take a portion of the now-reduced military R&D budget and devote it to DOE/NASA/other FFRDC/etc. research, but what are the odds of that actually happening?
it turns out that soldiers and sailors are incredibly expensive. you guys get a shitty salary, but great benefits and the basic cost of keeping you guys around between the infrastructure and support etc. is just fucking ridiculous. i saw one figure that fielding a soldier costs a million bucks per year.
this is a large part of the reason - along with the philosophical decision that soldiers should be doing war stuff and not cooking or doing laundry - for the contractors coming in and doing a lot of the maintenance and these days, fighting. as incompetent and expensive as they are, they're still the model of efficiency when compared to getting a soldier to do that stuff.
I'm going to have to argue this from a UK standpoint, but the US version is 95% the same in terms of costs and benefits. If I'm getting any bits demonstrably wrong, please enlighten me and I'd be happy to listen.
...but two parts of that are total bollocks.
First, the cost of fielding a soldier means the cost of keeping a soldier in the field. That means deployed on operations. That means logistics stretching from Alabama to Helmand. That means air-bridges; equipment; ammunition; shipping; national caveats; international pacts. That shit is expensive. More to the point, that shit is more expensive for civilians, because whereas soldiers are taken at risk, civilian government employees - or their departments - have a much lower appetite for risk. In Afghanistan, certain civilian departments in both the US and UK have to be flown from place to place, where soldiers can take road or vehicle convoys. They also have a much higher rate of deployment pay. And though civilian employees don't fire ammunition or incur the same equipment expenditure, somebody has to, that is the point of war: unless you reduce the requirement to fight war, soldiers are no more expensive in firing ammunition than civilians. It is the ammunition that costs money. If you take the cost per task for soldiers and civilians, the latter are far more expensive, due to the lower risk appetite they incur.
Agreed, the military get better benefits than private sector workers. But this is part of the covenant which you sign for agreeing to put your life on the line for the government. I don't think that's too much to ask. Also, if you compare military benefits to many other public sector workers (at least in the UK, here I'm not too sure about the US), they are roughly comparable, and in several areas civilian government employees have better benefits or contract arrangements.
So your point that "fielding" soldiers is expensive is wrong. "Fielding" anyone is expensive, and actually soldiers are much better value for money than other public employees who are deployed into warzones.
Second, your statement that contractors are a model of efficiency compared to "getting a soldier to do that stuff" is also untrue. Various figures have demonstrated that - so far - contracting out basic tasks such as cooking, maintaining housing and the like are much more expensive when contractor run than when run by the military. What you do get is a minimal increase in quality for a maximal increase in price. This is fairly intuitive: the contracts, risks and market that contractors take on in the private sector are far more generous to them and their employees than the monopoly of, essentially, slave labour who have no contracts and have to work 24/7 when ordered to do so. The price for the military doing those jobs has always been lower. The argument has always been that the quality will improve with contractors doing the job. The only way in which governments have argued that the price changes is in how it is represented on the books: paying a contractor over a set period is different to having to pay via the state today.
There is plenty within the military system which engenders waste and bad practice, but your fundamental points are wrong. Putting essentially free, unlimited labour to task is always going to be cheaper than hiring private contractors with defined limits and costs for their employees. If you want to save money within the military, you need to make the military work better, not farm out its job to people who want to make a profit.
This isn't such a hard principle for people to accept in many other public services, why would it be different in the one public service that has more leeway and control over its employees than any other?
your arguement that the solution to defense spending is making bullets cheaper is ridiculous.
first. soldiers don't give a damn how much their equipment costs. they just want it to work when they need it and if you give them more, they'll use more. if you give them the same amount they will still use the same amount. if you give them less, they will complain until someone buys them more.
second. reducing the cost of the round itself does little to handle the cost of training, storage, shipping, spare parts, support services or any of the other major logistic enterprises that go with any fielded weapon.
third. the only time you see a savings from the stuff costing less is when you actually buy whatever weapon it is and because of the way defense budgeting works, you are more likely to just buy more at that lower price than to recognize a savings and pocket the money. oh, and buying more items would increase the O&M costs.
Components↓_________________________________Funding↓ ___________Change, 2009 to 2010↓
Operations and maintenance ____________________$283.3 billion ___________ +4.2%
Military Personnel _____________________________$154.2 billion ___________ +5.0%
Procurement _________________________________$140.1 billion ___________ −1.8%
Research, Development, Testing & Evaluation _______$79.1 billion ____________ +1.3%
Military Construction ___________________________$23.9 billion ____________ +19.0%
Family Housing _______________________________$3.1 billion _____________ −20.2%
Total Spending _______________________________$685.1 billion ___________+3.0%
That's from the wiki page for the 2010 Budget of the DOD.
I believe procurement is a fancy name for government contractors. Clearly the most expensive things are operations/maintenance and the salaries for the actual people in the military.
When you look at budgets like this, with numbers in the hundreds of billions, I really wish there was better scrutiny on efficiency of spending. In almost any situation dealing with people working in buildings, there's a way to cut an extra 1% somehow; creative things like air conditioning/heating timers, running half lighting during the day, cutting a few cents off of everybody's paycheck.
With such huge numbers, tiny penny-pinching tricks can yield an extra billion dollars; and I don't believe they've used up every penny-pinching trick yet.
meh, you could save a shit ton just by changing the way congress funds shit, new projects wouldnt be as expensive by a long shot if the representatives approving it didnt want a piece of the pie and demand that the supply lines get rerouted through their districts. Inefficiencies like that cost the government a far more than penny-pinching lifestyle changes would save. Not really sure how to go about fixing that problem, but those kind of ridiculous demands are the very definition of wasted money.
I have a love-hate relationship with the M4. When it screws up, it screws up phenomenally. But when it does what it's supposed to, it's amazing.
Last weekend we were practicing close quarters shooting at the range. There were no more rounds left for my SAW so I borrowed an M4 to practice some more with. As a warm up I shot 30 rounds at a 300 meter target and all 30 hit. Then when it came down to do the close quarters, I had far too many malfunctions. Every time my rifle jammed, I would just think in my head "Welp, I'm dead again."
Back in Basic we practiced room clearing. We used special chalk rounds to shoot at each other. Many a times my team would bust into a room and there would be a jam of some sort. It completely screws everything up. There were so many times where I had to butt stroke or muzzle thump someone instead of firing a round. The thing is more than 40 years old. It's time for something better.
We need something better than the 5.56 round, too.
And don't even get me started on the M249 SAW. I'm the SAW gunner in my unit, and it's a good weapon, but we need something lighter with a better caliber and less jams. There are far too many parts for it (leading to more jams) and, again, it is also 5.56. It's pretty fun to shoot, though.
Actually, keeping people employed and routing stuff through towns is good. The point of government spending is to give people jobs they otherwise wouldn't get.
If you created a new mobile division, and just had them drive their troops through every town in America, it would be good for the economy because you'd create a demand for servicing people (the troops). Having them just roll into a town, buy up hotel rooms, go to the movies, teach some phys ed at schools, eat at restaurants, go grocery shopping, etc; it's just redistributing tax money (the troops' salary) into various private industries.
So I guess what I'm saying, is that the government should start just having proffesional shoppers that go around with tax money and spend in random towns that need more business.
Actually, keeping people employed and routing stuff through towns is good. The point of government spending is to give people jobs they otherwise wouldn't get.
Government takes tax money, they create either job or a demand for labour/goods that causes private jobs to be made. It's one of the proper uses of government spending. For example, roads. They're not only a valuable infrastructure asset, but it also emlpoys the people that design, build, and maintain the roads.
It's only a proper use if that money can't be better spent somewhere else. You can pay people to dig ditches, but it'd be better to pay people to build roads. In a situation where aggregate demand is fine, paying people to dig ditches may actually be detrimental as opposed to having that money in private hands.
- Aircraft carriers
- Air superiority fighters
- ICBMs
Really, there aren't any belligerents in the world with conventional modern forces. Some people mentioned China; are you living in the 1960s or some shit? China is in a mutually beneficial trading partnership with the West and is much more interested in getting it's population fluent in English than starting a fight. Nobody's waved a little red book in Beijing for quite some time.
North Korea is about the last hazardous nation with a semi-modern military left on the planet, and it's in terrible disrepair with what must be abysmal training for it's troops. The only active combatants the West deals with anymore are small, decentralized guerrillas without any aircraft, fixed positions, armored vehicles or infrastructure. Strategic weapons like carriers & ICBMs aren't of any use against guerrillas, and neither are air superiority aircraft. These systems are inefficient in contemporary times.
Really, though, if you wanted to save lives / improve the station of everyone on the planet (and if we were to assume that more money = more lives saved), you'd be much better off decapitating the military entirely and pouring the cash into medical research. Go ahead and check the figures for lives lost to hostile belligerents each year vs lives lost to heart disease or cancer. I dare you.
Aircraft carriers are tiny floating cities, they are the key component of force projection and are, as a pure bonus, great dispenser of humanitarian aid. Getting rid of aircraft carriers would be the same as America abdicating it's global position as a world power.
Some people mentioned China; are you living in the 1960s or some shit? China is in a mutually beneficial trading partnership with the West and is much more interested in getting it's population fluent in English than starting a fight. Nobody's waved a little red book in Beijing for quite some time.
Did you read what people posted? I'm not concerned about China attacking America, I'm concerned about China becoming the dominating military power in East Asia with no real rival.
So I guess what I'm saying, is that the government should start just having proffesional shoppers that go around with tax money and spend in random towns that need more business.
Modern Man on
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
Rigorous Scholarship
Components↓_________________________________Funding↓ ___________Change, 2009 to 2010↓
Operations and maintenance ____________________$283.3 billion ___________ +4.2%
Military Personnel _____________________________$154.2 billion ___________ +5.0%
Procurement _________________________________$140.1 billion ___________ −1.8%
Research, Development, Testing & Evaluation _______$79.1 billion ____________ +1.3%
Military Construction ___________________________$23.9 billion ____________ +19.0%
Family Housing _______________________________$3.1 billion _____________ −20.2%
Total Spending _______________________________$685.1 billion ___________+3.0%
That's from the wiki page for the 2010 Budget of the DOD.
I believe procurement is a fancy name for government contractors. Clearly the most expensive things are operations/maintenance and the salaries for the actual people in the military.
When you look at budgets like this, with numbers in the hundreds of billions, I really wish there was better scrutiny on efficiency of spending. In almost any situation dealing with people working in buildings, there's a way to cut an extra 1% somehow; creative things like air conditioning/heating timers, running half lighting during the day, cutting a few cents off of everybody's paycheck.
With such huge numbers, tiny penny-pinching tricks can yield an extra billion dollars; and I don't believe they've used up every penny-pinching trick yet.
That statemenet is 100% wrong. Procurement (also known as acquistions) is similar to R and D. Except its more so the development part of the R and D. Basically its a sort of project management, lifecycle management of weapon projects etc. Its more of the business end/determing what the military needs end of R and D. Procurement also trys to determine US military weak spots, and how to fix those weak spots. So when air force cyber command was set up, it was largely done so by the acquistions people.
Some people mentioned China; are you living in the 1960s or some shit? China is in a mutually beneficial trading partnership with the West and is much more interested in getting it's population fluent in English than starting a fight. Nobody's waved a little red book in Beijing for quite some time.
Did you read what people posted? I'm not concerned about China attacking America, I'm concerned about China becoming the dominating military power in East Asia with no real rival.
I'm worried that it would have real rivals and the region would be thrown into a massive arms race. I'm not really concerned about the growth of China's military power. U.S. will never scrap it's nuclear arsenal and naval power projection, which means that China won't be able to attack any of it's allies in the region.
I hope the military isn't paying too much for medical benefits, because in my experience the medical benefits are extremely low quality, and often so difficult to access (up to and including simply being flat out punished or discharged for accessing healthcare) that people simply avoid any contact with their supposed medical benefits.
On the submarine we had a full time corpsman who had only two jobs, the first (and most important) was doing mountains of paperwork on rad health nonsense so Navy Nuclear can continue to convince a paranoid public that they aren't constantly irradiating the public (they aren't, and have never been) the second was to ensure that no one was able to see a doctor if he could damn well help it.
And if someone managed to talk their way through him to a doctor, there was a full-time doctor up at squadron employed by Naval Undersea Medical whose sole job was to ensure that no one with the submarine designator was able to receive healthcare.
If you managed to talk your way past him he would attempt to have you submarine disqualified shortly thereafter as punishment, regardless of whether or not the actual doctors cleared you for submarine duty.
With so few people able to throttle healthcare access for so many down to a trickle, I have to wonder just how expensive those medical benefits really are.
I imagine that they are quite overstated, and the money is really being blown on something other than actual health services.
We had a running joke in army health care that if it didn't float, the navy wouldn't fund it. Hence the naval hospitals having issues all over the place.
Army hospitals, the problem was mostly that we had clinics all over the place acting like hospitals. All the actually good facilities with the high rate of satisfaction are centralized, and the theory is more "we'll ship specialists out every few months to take care of special cases"
But yeah, the health benefits are really really expensive. You're basically adding the normal procurement crap (I could order this off amazon for 20% the price, damnit!) to the inflated cost of medical supplies.
I hope the military isn't paying too much for medical benefits, because in my experience the medical benefits are extremely low quality, and often so difficult to access (up to and including simply being flat out punished or discharged for accessing healthcare) that people simply avoid any contact with their supposed medical benefits.
On the submarine we had a full time corpsman who had only two jobs, the first (and most important) was doing mountains of paperwork on rad health nonsense so Navy Nuclear can continue to convince a paranoid public that they aren't constantly irradiating the public (they aren't, and have never been) the second was to ensure that no one was able to see a doctor if he could damn well help it.
And if someone managed to talk their way through him to a doctor, there was a full-time doctor up at squadron employed by Naval Undersea Medical whose sole job was to ensure that no one with the submarine designator was able to receive healthcare.
If you managed to talk your way past him he would attempt to have you submarine disqualified shortly thereafter as punishment, regardless of whether or not the actual doctors cleared you for submarine duty.
With so few people able to throttle healthcare access for so many down to a trickle, I have to wonder just how expensive those medical benefits really are.
I imagine that they are quite overstated, and the money is really being blown on something other than actual health services.
We had a running joke in army health care that if it didn't float, the navy wouldn't fund it. Hence the naval hospitals having issues all over the place.
Army hospitals, the problem was mostly that we had clinics all over the place acting like hospitals. All the actually good facilities with the high rate of satisfaction are centralized, and the theory is more "we'll ship specialists out every few months to take care of special cases"
But yeah, the health benefits are really really expensive. You're basically adding the normal procurement crap (I could order this off amazon for 20% the price, damnit!) to the inflated cost of medical supplies.
My experience with Navy medical was horrible. Random forced trips to medical for shots and other random items I had no say in, always a fiasco, and any time I wanted to go to medical there were a million reasons why I didn't actually have to go to medical. And if they do let you go, good luck getting a note that you shouldn't return to work. The corpsmen are pretty much there to send your ass straight back, and if you manage to make it to a doctor and he does by some miracle give you a note you get shit for slacking off and accused of making things up and trying to get out of work.
Plus there was the time they gave me a "preventive filling" that I was forced to get against my will. Only to have it rot out several years later because they had left cotton in it that rotted, causing a massive root canal and I had to have my jaw bone drilled open so I wouldn't die. All out my own pocket by an emergency dental surgeon who didn't take insurance.
There was an article on NPR a couple weeks ago about how the Army wasn't giving out Purple Hearts to a group of soldiers who'd gotten concussions from a bomb blast. They were basically like "Yeah, I know the guidelines say we're supposed to for concussions, and I know one of our specialist doctors said you had concussions, and your officer filled out the paperwork for it, and you have lasting impairments from it, but it's not like a concussion is a real injury, so we're not giving it to you." It was pretty bad.
Components↓_________________________________Funding↓ ___________Change, 2009 to 2010↓
Operations and maintenance ____________________$283.3 billion ___________ +4.2%
Military Personnel _____________________________$154.2 billion ___________ +5.0%
Procurement _________________________________$140.1 billion ___________ −1.8%
Research, Development, Testing & Evaluation _______$79.1 billion ____________ +1.3%
Military Construction ___________________________$23.9 billion ____________ +19.0%
Family Housing _______________________________$3.1 billion _____________ −20.2%
Total Spending _______________________________$685.1 billion ___________+3.0%
That's from the wiki page for the 2010 Budget of the DOD.
I believe procurement is a fancy name for government contractors. Clearly the most expensive things are operations/maintenance and the salaries for the actual people in the military.
When you look at budgets like this, with numbers in the hundreds of billions, I really wish there was better scrutiny on efficiency of spending. In almost any situation dealing with people working in buildings, there's a way to cut an extra 1% somehow; creative things like air conditioning/heating timers, running half lighting during the day, cutting a few cents off of everybody's paycheck.
With such huge numbers, tiny penny-pinching tricks can yield an extra billion dollars; and I don't believe they've used up every penny-pinching trick yet.
That statemenet is 100% wrong. Procurement (also known as acquistions) is similar to R and D. Except its more so the development part of the R and D. Basically its a sort of project management, lifecycle management of weapon projects etc. Its more of the business end/determing what the military needs end of R and D. Procurement also trys to determine US military weak spots, and how to fix those weak spots. So when air force cyber command was set up, it was largely done so by the acquistions people.
procurement is buying things.
wether that be 100 widgets or 5 contractors to scrape the dirt off your boots is irrelevant. any activity that is in support of buying things would also be funded under procurement.
R&D and testing is funded under RDT&E money.
aquisitions is the entire process from R&D to Procurement to O&M. it is essentially how the military aquires systems.
to clarify, those categories above are different colors of money used in defense spending. each can only be used for certain activities. procurement dollars is used for buying things through contracts (with a few exceptions).
Air Force isn't giving disability for ringing ears anymore, not as serious as combat related stuff but pretty much everyone who works on the flightline gets it. Working near running jet engines all day will do that.
Here's a cost savings plan: Stop letting the Air Force deploy to hotels, make them live like the rest of us scrubs. And eliminate the comp pay that even an E-1 AF goon gets for having to slum in a facility run by a non-AF service branch.
Here's a cost savings plan: Stop letting the Air Force deploy to hotels, make them live like the rest of us scrubs. And eliminate the comp pay that even an E-1 AF goon gets for having to slum in a facility run by a non-AF service branch.
Eliminate the airforce and give its useful function to the army and navy. Defence budget slashed by over a half, guaranteed. But then I have a seething hatred of airforces and their stupid wasteful stupidity.
Here's a cost savings plan: Stop letting the Air Force deploy to hotels, make them live like the rest of us scrubs. And eliminate the comp pay that even an E-1 AF goon gets for having to slum in a facility run by a non-AF service branch.
Eliminate the airforce and give its useful function to the army and navy. Defence budget slashed by over a half, guaranteed. But then I have a seething hatred of airforces and their stupid wasteful stupidity.
"HAY GUYS WE RUNS OUT OF MONEY BUYING BIG SCREEN TVS FOR OUR ROOMS...WE CAN HAS MORE MONEY FOR BULLETS?"
No, really.
Much the same way the Army is apparently looking at combining the Reserves and National Guard (eliminating a lot of parallel commands and facilities), I see no reason we can't hack the Air Force up and make them live like they're actually in the military. Back to the U.S. Army Air Corps for you.
aircraft carriers are one of the best ways that we can project air support across the world without having to set up or take over an airstrip.
air superiority fighters are what protect those air support craft like helicopters, drones and slow attack bombers from enemy aircraft.
other countries do have aircraft. just because afghanistan doesn't have jets and anti air capability doesn't mean we can scrap ours.
I don't doubt for a second our need to maintain a carrier fleet.
I do doubt whether we need a fleet of our current size. At...11?...we have like half the aircraft carriers in the world. No other country has more than 2 (and only a couple have 2). Maybe we could get by with 8?
I don't doubt for a second our need to maintain a carrier fleet.
I do doubt whether we need a fleet of our current size. At...11?...we have like half the aircraft carriers in the world. No other country has more than 2 (and only a couple have 2). Maybe we could get by with 8?
This seems like a vague call. What leads you to believe that 11 is too much and 8 is the magic number?
If we want to cut down on the number of bases, which seems to be the general consensus, then cutting down fleet size at the same time seems unwise.
And as has been said before in here, our carriers are really the key element in our ability to wage war abroad, we reduce their number at our peril.
I don't doubt for a second our need to maintain a carrier fleet.
I do doubt whether we need a fleet of our current size. At...11?...we have like half the aircraft carriers in the world. No other country has more than 2 (and only a couple have 2). Maybe we could get by with 8?
This seems like a vague call. What leads you to believe that 11 is too much and 8 is the magic number?
If we want to cut down on the number of bases, which seems to be the general consensus, then cutting down fleet size at the same time seems unwise.
And as has been said before in here, our carriers are really the key element in our ability to wage war abroad, we reduce their number at our peril.
Our ability to wage war abroad is, at present, excessive. The only reason we're even stretched is because we're currently occupying and waging anti-insurgent campaigns in two foreign nations.
And I believe eleven is too much because it's as many as the rest of the world has combined. I mean, I think it's super-cool that we're maintaining a military that can go to war on every continent and in every ocean at once...but is it necessary?
I don't doubt for a second our need to maintain a carrier fleet.
I do doubt whether we need a fleet of our current size. At...11?...we have like half the aircraft carriers in the world. No other country has more than 2 (and only a couple have 2). Maybe we could get by with 8?
This seems like a vague call. What leads you to believe that 11 is too much and 8 is the magic number?
If we want to cut down on the number of bases, which seems to be the general consensus, then cutting down fleet size at the same time seems unwise.
And as has been said before in here, our carriers are really the key element in our ability to wage war abroad, we reduce their number at our peril.
Our ability to wage war abroad is, at present, excessive. The only reason we're even stretched is because we're currently occupying and waging anti-insurgent campaigns in two foreign nations.
And I believe eleven is too much because it's as many as the rest of the world has combined. I mean, I think it's super-cool that we're maintaining a military that can go to war on every continent and in every ocean at once...but is it necessary?
Well I sort of like it, and if we want to cut down on the expense and size of the military, which is a good idea to be sure, we can certainly do that without long term reductions in our ability to wage war, which seems a better idea.
I don't doubt for a second our need to maintain a carrier fleet.
I do doubt whether we need a fleet of our current size. At...11?...we have like half the aircraft carriers in the world. No other country has more than 2 (and only a couple have 2). Maybe we could get by with 8?
This seems like a vague call. What leads you to believe that 11 is too much and 8 is the magic number?
If we want to cut down on the number of bases, which seems to be the general consensus, then cutting down fleet size at the same time seems unwise.
And as has been said before in here, our carriers are really the key element in our ability to wage war abroad, we reduce their number at our peril.
you do realize that they've been slowly shutting down bases since 1988 right?
I don't doubt for a second our need to maintain a carrier fleet.
I do doubt whether we need a fleet of our current size. At...11?...we have like half the aircraft carriers in the world. No other country has more than 2 (and only a couple have 2). Maybe we could get by with 8?
This seems like a vague call. What leads you to believe that 11 is too much and 8 is the magic number?
If we want to cut down on the number of bases, which seems to be the general consensus, then cutting down fleet size at the same time seems unwise.
And as has been said before in here, our carriers are really the key element in our ability to wage war abroad, we reduce their number at our peril.
you do realize that they've been slowly shutting down bases since 1988 right?
Posts
Will's post, this page, last line. Verbatim.
Wow, that's just silly.
Two things:
1) I don't know about anybody else, but in my experience you can hardly call the increase in quality "minimal." I ate at both civilian-run and Army run dining facilities in Iraq...it was night and day. Same with laundry service...the quartermaster unit we had at one FOB was terrible compared to the civilians.
2) Contractor costs are fixed, and predictable. More or less. Whereas each soldier, the second he sets foot in country, gains a lifetime of benefits. And that only goes up if he gets injured (physically or mentally). Plus you get into retirement benefits for those that make a career of it, etc....if a Pakistani subcontractor's employee gets blown up, that cost is on the contractor. If a soldier gets blown up, the government has to pay out. And if he survives, the government gets to pay out a ton of money for a lifetime. Now, I'm not arguing that contractors are significantly cheaper; but the (high) cost is more predictable. Kind of like a new car costs a lot in payments, but nothing in maintenance...that older used car may wind up being much cheaper, or it may wind up costing you a bundle.
This is where the UK and US experience may diverge. UK army chefs have always been known, and still are, for extremely good quality - I literally have no idea how they do it, but they do, and on a budget. The big contracted messes in Bastion, KAF and the like are noticably poorer quality, and work off the same basic logistic chain.
Fair enough. Except as we both know, the risk for either soldiers or contractors at the major base locations (i.e. the only places where contractors work, and therefore this is an issue) is really pretty low. Yes, contractors costs are fixed, but I don't think the unpredictability of a military chef or laundryman being blown up in the middle of KAF justifies the extra expense that contractors incur, because not enough chefs or laundrymen get blown up.
If we were hiring contracted infantrymen, perhaps, but that isn't the argument (private security companies aside).
On the submarine we had a full time corpsman who had only two jobs, the first (and most important) was doing mountains of paperwork on rad health nonsense so Navy Nuclear can continue to convince a paranoid public that they aren't constantly irradiating the public (they aren't, and have never been) the second was to ensure that no one was able to see a doctor if he could damn well help it.
And if someone managed to talk their way through him to a doctor, there was a full-time doctor up at squadron employed by Naval Undersea Medical whose sole job was to ensure that no one with the submarine designator was able to receive healthcare.
If you managed to talk your way past him he would attempt to have you submarine disqualified shortly thereafter as punishment, regardless of whether or not the actual doctors cleared you for submarine duty.
With so few people able to throttle healthcare access for so many down to a trickle, I have to wonder just how expensive those medical benefits really are.
I imagine that they are quite overstated, and the money is really being blown on something other than actual health services.
Ha. It wasn't quite that bad in the Army, but it was bad. I mean, you have a full-fledged hospital on every post and sometimes I think that (aside from training sites) those are there almost entirely for families. Because soldiers are afraid to use them. And for good reason...my go-to story is sitting next to my buddy, who I had driven to the ER, while he waited for about half-an hour to be seen for a chainsaw injury. Like, he had lost control of a chainsaw with a faulty safety, and it had chopped up both is legs. No permanent damage, mind you, but tons of blood loss...meanwhile, an adorable little girl with a sniffle went in ahead of him.
Because what the fuck does Joe need to see a doctor for m i rite? Here's some Tylenol, man the fuck up.
However, hate to break it to you but I suspect that these benefits still manage to be quite expensive.
Ideally we'd be able to take a portion of the now-reduced military R&D budget and devote it to DOE/NASA/other FFRDC/etc. research, but what are the odds of that actually happening?
your arguement that the solution to defense spending is making bullets cheaper is ridiculous.
first. soldiers don't give a damn how much their equipment costs. they just want it to work when they need it and if you give them more, they'll use more. if you give them the same amount they will still use the same amount. if you give them less, they will complain until someone buys them more.
second. reducing the cost of the round itself does little to handle the cost of training, storage, shipping, spare parts, support services or any of the other major logistic enterprises that go with any fielded weapon.
third. the only time you see a savings from the stuff costing less is when you actually buy whatever weapon it is and because of the way defense budgeting works, you are more likely to just buy more at that lower price than to recognize a savings and pocket the money. oh, and buying more items would increase the O&M costs.
Operations and maintenance ____________________$283.3 billion ___________ +4.2%
Military Personnel _____________________________$154.2 billion ___________ +5.0%
Procurement _________________________________$140.1 billion ___________ −1.8%
Research, Development, Testing & Evaluation _______$79.1 billion ____________ +1.3%
Military Construction ___________________________$23.9 billion ____________ +19.0%
Family Housing _______________________________$3.1 billion _____________ −20.2%
Total Spending _______________________________$685.1 billion ___________+3.0%
That's from the wiki page for the 2010 Budget of the DOD.
I believe procurement is a fancy name for government contractors. Clearly the most expensive things are operations/maintenance and the salaries for the actual people in the military.
When you look at budgets like this, with numbers in the hundreds of billions, I really wish there was better scrutiny on efficiency of spending. In almost any situation dealing with people working in buildings, there's a way to cut an extra 1% somehow; creative things like air conditioning/heating timers, running half lighting during the day, cutting a few cents off of everybody's paycheck.
With such huge numbers, tiny penny-pinching tricks can yield an extra billion dollars; and I don't believe they've used up every penny-pinching trick yet.
How about you stop deploying them and then bring on the paycuts once they aren't literally dying for you.
Last weekend we were practicing close quarters shooting at the range. There were no more rounds left for my SAW so I borrowed an M4 to practice some more with. As a warm up I shot 30 rounds at a 300 meter target and all 30 hit. Then when it came down to do the close quarters, I had far too many malfunctions. Every time my rifle jammed, I would just think in my head "Welp, I'm dead again."
Back in Basic we practiced room clearing. We used special chalk rounds to shoot at each other. Many a times my team would bust into a room and there would be a jam of some sort. It completely screws everything up. There were so many times where I had to butt stroke or muzzle thump someone instead of firing a round. The thing is more than 40 years old. It's time for something better.
We need something better than the 5.56 round, too.
And don't even get me started on the M249 SAW. I'm the SAW gunner in my unit, and it's a good weapon, but we need something lighter with a better caliber and less jams. There are far too many parts for it (leading to more jams) and, again, it is also 5.56. It's pretty fun to shoot, though.
If you created a new mobile division, and just had them drive their troops through every town in America, it would be good for the economy because you'd create a demand for servicing people (the troops). Having them just roll into a town, buy up hotel rooms, go to the movies, teach some phys ed at schools, eat at restaurants, go grocery shopping, etc; it's just redistributing tax money (the troops' salary) into various private industries.
So I guess what I'm saying, is that the government should start just having proffesional shoppers that go around with tax money and spend in random towns that need more business.
What.
- Aircraft carriers
- Air superiority fighters
- ICBMs
Really, there aren't any belligerents in the world with conventional modern forces. Some people mentioned China; are you living in the 1960s or some shit? China is in a mutually beneficial trading partnership with the West and is much more interested in getting it's population fluent in English than starting a fight. Nobody's waved a little red book in Beijing for quite some time.
North Korea is about the last hazardous nation with a semi-modern military left on the planet, and it's in terrible disrepair with what must be abysmal training for it's troops. The only active combatants the West deals with anymore are small, decentralized guerrillas without any aircraft, fixed positions, armored vehicles or infrastructure. Strategic weapons like carriers & ICBMs aren't of any use against guerrillas, and neither are air superiority aircraft. These systems are inefficient in contemporary times.
Really, though, if you wanted to save lives / improve the station of everyone on the planet (and if we were to assume that more money = more lives saved), you'd be much better off decapitating the military entirely and pouring the cash into medical research. Go ahead and check the figures for lives lost to hostile belligerents each year vs lives lost to heart disease or cancer. I dare you.
air superiority fighters are what protect those air support craft like helicopters, drones and slow attack bombers from enemy aircraft.
other countries do have aircraft. just because afghanistan doesn't have jets and anti air capability doesn't mean we can scrap ours.
Aircraft carriers are tiny floating cities, they are the key component of force projection and are, as a pure bonus, great dispenser of humanitarian aid. Getting rid of aircraft carriers would be the same as America abdicating it's global position as a world power.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
Did you read what people posted? I'm not concerned about China attacking America, I'm concerned about China becoming the dominating military power in East Asia with no real rival.
Rigorous Scholarship
That statemenet is 100% wrong. Procurement (also known as acquistions) is similar to R and D. Except its more so the development part of the R and D. Basically its a sort of project management, lifecycle management of weapon projects etc. Its more of the business end/determing what the military needs end of R and D. Procurement also trys to determine US military weak spots, and how to fix those weak spots. So when air force cyber command was set up, it was largely done so by the acquistions people.
I'm worried that it would have real rivals and the region would be thrown into a massive arms race. I'm not really concerned about the growth of China's military power. U.S. will never scrap it's nuclear arsenal and naval power projection, which means that China won't be able to attack any of it's allies in the region.
We had a running joke in army health care that if it didn't float, the navy wouldn't fund it. Hence the naval hospitals having issues all over the place.
Army hospitals, the problem was mostly that we had clinics all over the place acting like hospitals. All the actually good facilities with the high rate of satisfaction are centralized, and the theory is more "we'll ship specialists out every few months to take care of special cases"
But yeah, the health benefits are really really expensive. You're basically adding the normal procurement crap (I could order this off amazon for 20% the price, damnit!) to the inflated cost of medical supplies.
My experience with Navy medical was horrible. Random forced trips to medical for shots and other random items I had no say in, always a fiasco, and any time I wanted to go to medical there were a million reasons why I didn't actually have to go to medical. And if they do let you go, good luck getting a note that you shouldn't return to work. The corpsmen are pretty much there to send your ass straight back, and if you manage to make it to a doctor and he does by some miracle give you a note you get shit for slacking off and accused of making things up and trying to get out of work.
Plus there was the time they gave me a "preventive filling" that I was forced to get against my will. Only to have it rot out several years later because they had left cotton in it that rotted, causing a massive root canal and I had to have my jaw bone drilled open so I wouldn't die. All out my own pocket by an emergency dental surgeon who didn't take insurance.
edit: Found it.
procurement is buying things.
wether that be 100 widgets or 5 contractors to scrape the dirt off your boots is irrelevant. any activity that is in support of buying things would also be funded under procurement.
R&D and testing is funded under RDT&E money.
aquisitions is the entire process from R&D to Procurement to O&M. it is essentially how the military aquires systems.
to clarify, those categories above are different colors of money used in defense spending. each can only be used for certain activities. procurement dollars is used for buying things through contracts (with a few exceptions).
Eliminate the airforce and give its useful function to the army and navy. Defence budget slashed by over a half, guaranteed. But then I have a seething hatred of airforces and their stupid wasteful stupidity.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
"HAY GUYS WE RUNS OUT OF MONEY BUYING BIG SCREEN TVS FOR OUR ROOMS...WE CAN HAS MORE MONEY FOR BULLETS?"
No, really.
Much the same way the Army is apparently looking at combining the Reserves and National Guard (eliminating a lot of parallel commands and facilities), I see no reason we can't hack the Air Force up and make them live like they're actually in the military. Back to the U.S. Army Air Corps for you.
I don't doubt for a second our need to maintain a carrier fleet.
I do doubt whether we need a fleet of our current size. At...11?...we have like half the aircraft carriers in the world. No other country has more than 2 (and only a couple have 2). Maybe we could get by with 8?
This seems like a vague call. What leads you to believe that 11 is too much and 8 is the magic number?
If we want to cut down on the number of bases, which seems to be the general consensus, then cutting down fleet size at the same time seems unwise.
And as has been said before in here, our carriers are really the key element in our ability to wage war abroad, we reduce their number at our peril.
Our ability to wage war abroad is, at present, excessive. The only reason we're even stretched is because we're currently occupying and waging anti-insurgent campaigns in two foreign nations.
And I believe eleven is too much because it's as many as the rest of the world has combined. I mean, I think it's super-cool that we're maintaining a military that can go to war on every continent and in every ocean at once...but is it necessary?
Well I sort of like it, and if we want to cut down on the expense and size of the military, which is a good idea to be sure, we can certainly do that without long term reductions in our ability to wage war, which seems a better idea.
you do realize that they've been slowly shutting down bases since 1988 right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_Realignment_and_Closure
Mhm.