Will it ever stop? Now we can't try terrorists for want of money. Send them to the military tribunal, we're paying the military tilecrawlers whether they need it or not.
But the defense cuts are really grating my nerves. How can there not be huge politics involved?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22082928 ZOMG, we're going to cut $591 million from now until FY end in October. We'll lose 45,000 flight hours of training!!! Srsly? Ok, I know the cuts are going at operating budgets and not sunk costs but if flexibility was given to leaders, here are some options.
-Roughly 550,000 DOD civ and uniformed military in the AF, about $1100 per person. Cut all non-essential DOD travel until October. No schools unless it's local, detachments can live in tents or barracks instead of the Hilton until Oct. (I just spent about 2K of the gov's travel money, believe me, I'm not essential) Accelerate attrition, if someone is ETS this FY, give them an option to take a 90 day early out. Cut all reserve drills to the minimum required.
-Hey, why not buy 18 F-22s this year instead of 19? Contract? What contract, see GM, rules don't apply anymore.
-Slow the UAV purchases, huge part of the budget from here on out.
But anyway, just dreaming, back to being pissed off. This was 3% cut, made slightly more drastic in that it is coming out of 6 months of the fiscal year. The USAF has approximately 5500 aircraft in inventory. If they were all flying, the stated 45,000 training hour cut is 8 hrs per airframe. There are way more pilots than airframes, so 2-3 hours lost over 6 months for the pile-its? That's assuming 100% aircraft availability which never happens. Call it 50% to be a worst case scenario reflecting all the aircraft in rework, just plain broke etc and double the numbers. Still, no great hit.
Now, the $591 million budget reduction for the whole USAF. There are many platforms flying, so pick a conservative number and say a composite flight hour costs $10,000 to accomplish. With the 45K flight hour reduction there is 450 million right there. What exactly is the non-pointy end of the USAF contributing? How exactly does a 3% budget cut end up this drastic?
I'm just irritated, USN aviation is doing the same thing, cancelled deployments, reduced training, etc. No opinion on whether the deployments are nationally necessary, but when a 3% budget cut causes you to show the world 30-50% less of you it sure sends up a giant pussy flag to the rest of the world, especially those who stir the pot. I'd like to see a real 3% cut, not this fear mongering BS. Wait for it, in the next month Iran will start some major crap and we'll hear some mealy mouthed whining about how we can't afford enough carriers on spot to set condition stone age on the little nut.