There Is Plenty To Cut At the Pentagon

Hugh Pickens writes "William D. Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, writes that although we have been bombarded with tales of woe about the potentially devastating impacts of cutting the Pentagon budget 8% under the sequester, examples of egregious waste and misplaced spending priorities at the Pentagon abound. One need look no further than the department's largest weapons program, the F-35 combat aircraft, which has just been grounded again after a routine inspection revealed a crack on a turbine blade in the jet engine of an F-35 test aircraft in California. Even before it has moved into full-scale production, the plane has already increased in price by 75%, and it has so far failed to meet basic performance standards. By the Pentagon's own admission, building and operating three versions of the F-35 — one for the Air Force, one for the Navy and one for the Marines — will cost more than $1.4 trillion over its lifetime, making it the most expensive weapons program ever undertaken. And in an era in which aerial combat is of diminishing importance and upgraded versions of current generation U.S. aircraft can more than do the job, it is not at all clear that we need to purchase more than 2,400 of these planes. Cutting the two most expensive versions of the F-35 will save over $60 billion in the next decade."

Comments

Re:No bias at all...

[Jawnn]

Point is, yes, the man from the CIP, a group dedicated to the eradication of the world's militaries, but particularly the US military, thinks we should cut the military. Shocking. I love how people for various things never call their organization by their true intentions, but always give it something normal and official sounding, to create a built in bias towards thinking they are legit when they call for things.

So..., you're saying that an organization that, "...promotes transparency and accountability in U.S. foreign policy, while advocating a foreign policy that promotes international cooperation, demilitarization and respect for human rights..." (taken directly from the CIP mission statement) should have no credibility? That it's not possible that one of the reasons that they support "demilitarization" is that they actually understand that the business of war is hugely profitable and the money that is spend on that might be better spent on better things? Riiiiiiight....

Re:I say cut the F-35

[Nidi62]

the simple fact of the matter is that entitlement spending dwarfs defense spending.

The problem is that defense spending has BECOME entitlement spending. It is welfare for the defense contractors, who have no incentive to remain within budget or timelines. We can cut defense spending without having to cut a single program in production or development: all we have to do is make sure that companies are held to the promises they make when the bid for a contract. And, if they intentionally underbid or underestimated the program well, then they need to eat the cost of that overrun, just like a company would in any other industry. This isn't cutting spending, it is simply cutting costs. We still get everything we need, we just don't pay out the ass for it.

Enough with the damn spending cuts

[rsilvergun]

We're not broke people. Really. We're not. This is what people in politics call a "Narrative". It's a story to get you to vote a certain way. Specifically to vote for massive tax cuts for the rich so they can pocket all the gains in productivity from the last 50 years.

Cut all the "Waste" you want. It'll never come close or be a drop in the bucket against what the ultra wealthy are taking from you on a daily basis. I tell ya man, dog eat dog capitalism for the poor, socialism for the wealthy...

Re:I say cut the F-35

[hrvatska]

Some insurance companies can go bankrupt. Others, like AIG, apparently cannot. And probably, if any of the other large insurance companies that provide millions of seniors with retirement income through annuities was about to go bankrupt, the federal government and the Fed would likely figure out a way to keep it afloat and continue paying on its obligations. If you think Social Security has problems, it is nothing compared to the coming problems faced by China's pension system. It has worse demographics and the retirement age is much lower (55 for women, 60 for men) than in the U.S. And, it's not just China and the US. Japan, Europe in general, Brazil, and Russia face the same dilemma. I don't think every major country's currency is going to become worthless and I don't think they are going throw all their elderly out on the street, either. There are fixes for both Social Security and Medicare, but political gridlock in Washington prevents any meaningful change.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[nbauman]

Social Security isn't bankrupt.

To quote Paul Krugman:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/opinion/16krugman.html

But neither of these potential problems is a clear and present danger. Social Security has been running surpluses for the last quarter-century, banking those surpluses in a special account, the so-called trust fund. The program won’t have to turn to Congress for help or cut benefits until or unless the trust fund is exhausted, which the program’s actuaries don’t expect to happen until 2037 — and there’s a significant chance, according to their estimates, that that day will never come. ...

What’s really going on here? Conservatives hate Social Security for ideological reasons: its success undermines their claim that government is always the problem, never the solution. But they receive crucial support from Washington insiders, for whom a declared willingness to cut Social Security has long served as a badge of fiscal seriousness, never mind the arithmetic.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[geoskd]

Social Security isn't bankrupt.

To quote Paul Krugman:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/opinion/16krugman.html

But neither of these potential problems is a clear and present danger. Social Security has been running surpluses for the last quarter-century, banking those surpluses in a special account, the so-called trust fund. The program won’t have to turn to Congress for help or cut benefits until or unless the trust fund is exhausted, which the program’s actuaries don’t expect to happen until 2037 — and there’s a significant chance, according to their estimates, that that day will never come. ...

What’s really going on here?

Whats really going on here is that trust fund you mentioned has no cash in it. It is entirely funded by "special" government bonds to social security. The result is that the cash is gone, and the government owes itself the money back. The crisis isn't that social security will go bankrupt, the crisis is that social security loaned the money to the US government as a whole, and it looks like the US government might not be willing to pay back those bonds. The US government wants to pretend those bonds wont really need to be repaid so that they can renege on the payment of the bonds. The thinking is this, if Social security is changed so that it does not pay out as much benefit to each individual, then there truly has been a surplus over the last half century. That being the case, then congress would not have to repay those bonds (because social security wouldn't need all of the money to pay its obligations). By not having to repay all of those bonds, congress could wipe that expense off the budget and as such would have more money to waste on craptastic jet fighters and tax breaks for people and companies making more money than Cuba. Its a giant game of smoke and mirrors, and its complicated enough that very few people have yet realized that the money is already gone. The rich stole it from us in the form of tax breaks for the very wealthy.

Re:I say cut the F-35

[KiloByte]

Yes, bribing legislatures this way is a textbook definition of corruption.