Military Must Do More with Less

Photo Credit: Washington Examiner We live in oxymoronic times. Everyone recognizes the need for a streamlined, more efficient Pentagon. Yet Congress won’t let the Department of Defense close another base or increase the copayments military families make for their very generous health insurance plans. Continuing resolutions and sequestration prevent weapons makers from doing a deal with the Pentagon that sticks.

The defense budget is in free fall by some measures, facing $492 billion in possible sequester cuts over nine years, or roughly $55 billion annually. These come on top of earlier cuts by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates and in addition to huge reductions in war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the U.S. military budget still totals $600 billion. That is 40 percent of what the entire world spends on defense, and substantially more than the Cold War average in inflation-adjusted terms.

President Obama wants to do nation-building at home, end the country’s wars and avoid involvement in Syria. Yet he is also committed to “rebalancing” the military to put greater emphasis on the Asia-Pacific region and preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Meanwhile, he still maintains 50,000 troops in Afghanistan, nearly double than when he took office.

The secretary of defense said last year that sequestration would be catastrophic for the military, yet half a year into sequestration the sky has not fallen. The sequester, which went into effect in March, has not yet fundamentally jeopardized our national security or the state of our armed forces, and some of the $40 billion in defense cuts in 2013 reflected reasonable pruning.

But other savings will be far more perilous. Dramatically reducing training for many military units, as was done this summer, is tolerable — but only for a short period. It would be debilitating if this continued, particularly to young troops who have never had intensive training.

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