There are many ways to balance a budget.
Most of us, for example, spend 30 percent or more of our income on housing. Skipping mortgage payments is a sure-fire way to make ends meet – until they take your house away.
Health insurance can be a real waste, too, if you’re healthy. Dropping it may seem like a great idea – until you get sick or have an accident.
These are, of course, clear-cut examples of misguided fiscal thinking.
Which brings us to the latest craze in Washington when it comes to balancing the books: gutting defense.
Consider the “sequestration” option laid out in the Budget Control Act of 2011. It provides for automatic reductions in “discretionary” spending. For the military, that would mean huge cuts. In the first year alone, sequestration would slash defense spending up to 18 percent. Over 10 years, our armed forces would take a trillion-dollar hit.
The majority staff in the House Armed Services Committee recently took a hard look at the details – and spelled out what cuts on that scale would mean to the size and capabilities of our military. Their findings were stunning. The Army would be smaller than it was before 9/11, for one thing – too small to mount sustained operations such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq. That would be fine if the U.S. never had to undertake major military operations again. Of course, that was the thinking behind the reductions we had before Afghanistan and Iraq. And that didn’t work out very well.
The Navy would lose several dozen ships, making it by far the smallest since 1914. Yes, modern ships are much more capable than they were in the age of dreadnaughts. But the world is still the same size. The United States didn’t even have a carrier available at the start of the Libya operation. Under a sequestered budget, there could be at least two fewer carrier battle groups.
The Air Force would be the oldest and smallest since we started having an air force. The United States has enjoyed air supremacy in every conflict since World War II. There’s no guarantee that will be true in the next conflict.
As for the Marine Corps, it’s not much use without the amphibious ships that carry the troops, the aircraft, and the fire support that transport the marines worldwide. After the cuts, the marines could be short by up to one-third of the amphibious ships they need to move and support their operations. Of course, the Pentagon doesn’t have to distribute these cuts equally.
They could focus on one part of the world, and one or two services. We could, for example, only worry about China and starve the Army and the Marines to build up air and naval forces in the Pacific. But that would be as foolish as building a car with lights and engine, but no steering wheel or brakes.
There’s a problem with militaries designed to do only one thing well: The enemy gets a vote. Every war the U.S. has fought in recent years was in an unexpected place against an unanticipated enemy. Having a “scalpel” for a military doesn’t help much when what you really need is a Swiss Army knife.
The reality is that more defense cuts mean the U.S. simply will no longer be the military power it once was. As a result, America will be less safe.
To make matters worse, gutting defense won’t even solve America’s budget problems. Defense spending could go to zero today, and spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security over the next few decades will still consume the entire federal budget.
The only way to stop sequestration is for a congressional “super committee” to propose an alternative long-term plan to reduce the deficit – a plan that Congress and the president must agree to.
Let’s hope they don’t come up with a “super folly” that degrades America’s military and bankrupts the nation.
Great stuff as always, Mr Carafano. It's as if the general public has never thought about the basics behind why their garages are stuffed with gadgets, their attics full with momentos, and their closets big enough to walk into and spin in amazement at gathered goods. Despite a bonanza of television sets within the home, I'm afraid many of our issues will be hard to solve until Americans are given the hard facts by an unbiased news media. For example, nobody knows that the detention facilites at Guantanamo Bay are modeled after top U.S. prisons and have a full hospital for every in-grown toenail or digested Koran. They are a campus of buildings about the size of Big-Box stores and they are awash with carribean air and if you are a Chinese Muslim at the Uigher village, they'll run into town and get you a bag of McDonald's food treats anytime you request it, or a chest of ice to hold some cold sodas. Americans have never seen that full display of television footage. That flow of images stops at the newsroom, along with any suggestion that our military protects the constitutional freedoms that have produced unfettered trade and commerce all across the world.
Yeah James, those Super Carriers should deter the terrorists…especially the ones with box cutters.
Why don't you re-invest your Halliburton dividends as donations to the Pentagon if you want to support the bloated military budget?
For myself and the majority of Middle Class Americans, 47 cents on the dollar for the military is at least 75% too much of our tax dollars. We want to spend it on jobs, infrastructure, research and educating the next Einstein.
Your ilk should support war out of your own pockets, not ours.
The only "super folly" the USA can make is to not cut military funding to at least half in five years. Americans need American tax dollars instead of giving them to military contractors to waste.
Not that a country should have no military system of defense. But if it takes 20 countries, 2 through 21 in the ranking of military spending, to match the military expenditures of the United States, and if China, number 2 in the ranking, spends 17% of what the USA spends, then–as a taxpayer–I want to see a cost-benefit analysis that shows that we are better off because of it. And I don't mean marginally, I mean substantially better off. Otherwise, I'd say a draconian reduction is well in order. And let's use the money to fund public education, health care, and all the other services that modern civilized societies enjoy.
I rest my case.
I've worked for the military. Expenditures on things like per diem while traveling was extraordinary and wasteful. People liked being sent out of town for work because it is a money making proposition. In addition to car, hotel, etc. being paid for, we got around $75/day. $75/day!
Additionally, in day to day operations people were wasteful by printing full page powerpoint slides in full color as drafts, one sided, etc. When I worked in a private firm, we had to seek permission from the director to print in color.
There is plenty of fat to be trimmed. We'll just see if people chop off a leg instead.
I wonder what the expenditures of governments' are who've become more burdensome and unfairly costly, whose benefit has become by favor, compared to America's military defense that benefits all the country? Totally agree there is plenty of fat to be trimmed, lets start where it isn't compromising the country's safety and security that benefits ALL America! removing all costs that fund unconstitutional acts of government would be one place to start!