Secretary of Defense Gates ruffled many feathers today when he proposed a 2010 DoD budget that would see significant restructuring of our military spending away from fetishized glamor projects that benefit specific defense contractors to rational choices that will help support our troops.
Specifically, Gates is proposed curtailing several programs that have seen major cost overruns and which do not address the kind of wars we find ourselves fighting, and is instead proposing expenditures to help make sure we have the appropriate manpower and equipment to actually win our wars. Most notable would be the closing out of the massively overinflated F-22 program, a reduction in missile defense, and the potential scrapping of a fleet of presidential helicopters. Money saved in these areas would instead go to acquiring littoral combat craft for the Navy, acquiring additional drones to provide necessary air support to our ground operations, and bolstering our military numbers by expanding the armed forces.
I've written before about problems in military procurement, as highlighted by the GAO in reports on poor planning and the resulting massive cost overruns. For years, military procurement has been treated as if each specific project were critical, so critical that any amount of cost and time overrun could be accepted. In contrast, Gates appears to be taking the tack that military capability in general is critical, and thus underperforming procurement efforts need to be scrapped in favor of things that we can actually deploy to support our troops.
One would imagine this would be appreciated by nominal conservatives, inasmuch as it's both patriotic and fiscally prudent. If a military project is so over-budget that we end up getting only 25% of the F-22s we projected, and years late at that, then clearly we are not supporting our troops and our national security by funneling more money down an endless hole.
Unfortunately, the response instead has been to put up a patriotic facade in the defense of cash money coming into home districts:
A bipartisan group of senators released a letter during Gates' announcement that urged him "not to allow deep cuts in U.S. missile defense programs that are critically important to protecting our homeland and our allies against the growing threat of ballistic missiles."
"The threat from ballistic missiles is significant and on the rise. [It] has been underscored by Iran and North Korea's recent missile tests," they argued.
The letter was signed by both senators from Alaska -- Republican Lisa Murkowski and Democrat Mark Begich -- among others.
...and...
Georgia Republicans slammed President Obama for Gates' announcement about the phase-out of the F-22 Raptor, which is assembled in Cobb County, Georgia.
Rep. Tom Price, whose district includes the Raptor production facility, called the cut "outrageous" and said Obama's "priorities are deeply flawed." Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss said he was "disappointed" in the cuts and accused the administration of being "willing to sacrifice the lives of American military men and women for the sake of domestic programs."
Saxby Chambliss is a lying bastard. He doesn't care about the lives of members of our military. He cares that the bloated F-22 unit price is coming into his state. I'll go with Gates on this one - more soldiers on the ground and more drones in the air mean more dead terrorists and more live American troops. The F-22 is a fine piece of engineering, but it's not keeping our troops alive right now, and only the leverage of people like Chambliss, who value their patch of America more than American soldiers, let it bloat as much as it did.
Gates also announced that he would be shifting jobs away from private contractors to government employees, moving from a DoD workforce that is 39% private to the pre-Bush-administration level of 26%. As the GAO has highlighted, private contractors cost more than government employees. Despite the right-wing religious belief that private industry is always cheaper, the facts show us that this is frequently untrue.
Indeed, it's sickening how much this false belief undervalues the patriotism discount we receive every day from millions of government employees. After all, how much would you need to be paid to risk your life for no good reason? What if you were doing it to protect your country? It's this decision, repeated over and over again throughout the local, state, and federal government positions, that gets us skilled employees for much cheaper than we ever could from the private market.
We'll see how much of Gates' proposed budget makes it through the House and Senate intact. I encourage you to do what I'm doing, and write to your Representative and Senators to let them know that you support the Secretary of Defense in his efforts to make our military strong and effective.
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