Obama lashes waste in defense spending

[longeyes]

Maybe it's time to collect the bill for the defense umbrella we've provided for the West for over half a century?   With interest.

[Blakenzy]

These are parts of an article I found. Seems like an interesting read:

[...] This self-destructive system of bloated budgets and purchases of the wrong weapons has persisted for so long thanks to the aura of invincibility surrounding the Armed Forces and a mistaken belief that jobs in the arms industry are as valuable to the economy as jobs in the civilian sector.

Recently, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen began to advocate nothing less than protecting the Pentagon budget by pegging defense spending to a fixed percentage of gross domestic product (GDP, the total value of goods and services produced by the economy).

This would, of course, mean simply throwing out serious strategic analysis of what is actually needed for national defense. Mullen wants, instead, to raise the annual defense budget in the worst of times to at least 4% of GDP.

Such a policy is clearly designed to deceive the public about ludicrously wasteful spending on weapons systems which has gone on for decades.[...]

[...] Many people believe that our military is the largest, best equipped, and most invincible among the world's armed forces.

None of these things is true, but our military is, without a doubt, the most expensive to maintain. Each year, we Americans account for nearly half of all global military spending, an amount larger than the next 45 nations together spend on their militaries annually.

Equally striking, the military seems increasingly ill-adapted to the types of wars that Pentagon strategists agree the United States is most likely to fight in the future, and is, in fact, already fighting in Afghanistan -- insurgencies led by non-state actors.

While the Department of Defense produces weaponry meant for such wars, it is also squandering staggering levels of defense appropriations on aircraft, ships, and futuristic weapons systems that fascinate generals and admirals, and are beloved by military contractors mainly because their complexity runs up their cost to astronomical levels.

That most of these will actually prove irrelevant to the world in which we live matters not a whit to their makers or purchasers. Thought of another way, the stressed out American taxpayer, already supporting two disastrous wars and the weapons systems that go with them, is also paying good money for weapons that are meant for fantasy wars, for wars that will only be fought in the battlescapes and war-gaming imaginations of Defense Department "planners."

The Air Force and the Army are still planning as if, in the reasonably near future, they were going to fight an old-fashioned war of attrition against the Soviet Union, which disappeared in 1991; while the Navy, with its eleven large aircraft-carrier battle groups, is, as William S. Lind has written, "still structured to fight the Imperial Japanese Navy."

Lind, a prominent theorist of so-called fourth-generation warfare (insurgencies carried out by groups such as al-Qaeda), argues that "the Navy's aircraft-carrier battle groups have cruised on mindlessly for more than half a century, waiting for those Japanese carriers to turn up. They are still cruising today, into, if not beyond, irrelevance… Submarines are today's and tomorrow's capital ships; the ships that most directly determine control of blue waters."

In December 2008, Franklin "Chuck" Spinney, a former high-ranking civilian in the Pentagon's Office of Systems Analysis (set up in 1961 to make independent evaluations of Pentagon policy) and a charter member of the "Fighter Mafia" of the 1980s and 1990s, wrote, "As has been documented for at least twenty years, patterns of repetitive habitual behavior in the Pentagon have created a self-destructive decision-making process. This process has produced a death spiral."

As a result, concluded Spinney, inadequate amounts of wildly overpriced equipment are purchased, "new weapons [that] do not replace old ones on a one for one basis." There is also "continual pressure to reduce combat readiness," a "corrupt accounting system" that "makes it impossible to sort out the priorities," and a readiness to believe that old solutions will work for the current crisis.

Failed Reform Efforts

There's no great mystery about the causes of the deep dysfunction that has long characterized the Pentagon's weapons procurement system. In 2006, Thomas Christie, former head of Operational Test and Evaluation, the most senior official at the Department of Defense for testing weapons and a Pentagon veteran of half a century, detailed more than 35 years of efforts to reform the weapons acquisition system. [...]

Christie concluded: "After all these years of repeated reform efforts, major defense programs are taking 20 to 30 years to deliver less capability than planned, very often at two to three times the costs and schedules planned." He also added the following observations:

"Launching into major developments without understanding key technical issues is the root cause of major cost and schedule problems… Costs, schedules, and technical risks are often grossly understated at the outset… There are more acquisition programs being pursued than DoD [the Department of Defense] can possibly afford in the long term…

"By the time these problems are acknowledged, the political penalties incurred in enforcing any major restructuring of a program, much less its cancellation, are too painful to bear. Unless someone is willing to stand up and point out that the emperor has no clothes, the U.S. military will continue to hemorrhage taxpayer dollars and critical years while acquiring equipment that falls short of meeting the needs of troops in the field."[...] 

Our problems are those of a very rich country which has become accustomed over the years to defense budgets that are actually jobs programs and also a major source of pork for the use of politicians in their reelection campaigns.

Given the present major recession, whose depths remain unknown, the United States has better things to spend its money on than Nimitz-class aircraft carriers at a price of $6.2 billion each (the cost of the USS George H. W. Bush, launched in January 2009, our tenth such ship) or aircraft that can cruise at a speed of Mach 2 (1,352 miles per hour).

However, don't wait for the Pentagon to sort out such matters. If it has proven one thing over the last decades, it's that it is thoroughly incapable of reforming itself.

According to Christie, "Over the past 20 or so years, the DoD and its components have deliberately and systematically decimated their in-house technical capabilities to the point where there is little, if any, competence or initiative left in the various organizations tasked with planning and executing its budget and acquisition programs."

Gunning for the Air Force

President Obama has almost certainly retained Robert M. Gates as Secretary of Defense in part to give himself some bipartisan cover as he tries to come to grips with the bloated defense budget. Gates is also sympathetic to the desire of a few reformers in the Pentagon to dump the Lockheed-Martin F-22 "Raptor" supersonic stealth fighter, a plane designed to meet the Soviet Union's last proposed, but never built, interceptor.

The Air Force's old guard and its allies in Congress are already fighting back aggressively. In June 2008, Gates fired Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff General T. Michael Moseley. Though he was undoubtedly responding to their fervent support for the F-22, his cover explanation was their visible failure to adequately supervise the accounting and control of nuclear weapons.[...]

More than 20 years ago, Chuck Spinney wrote a classic account of the now-routine bureaucratic scams practiced within the Pentagon to ensure that Congress will appropriate funds for dishonestly advertised and promoted weapons systems and then prevent their cancellation when the fraud comes to light.

In a paper he entitled "Defense Power Games," of which his superiors deeply disapproved, Spinney outlined two crucial Pentagon gambits meant to lock in such weaponry: "front-loading" and "political engineering."

It should be understood at the outset that all actors involved, including the military officers in charge of projects, the members of Congress who use defense appropriations to buy votes within their districts, and the contractors who live off the ensuing lucrative contracts, utilize these two scams.

It is also important to understand that neither front-loading nor political engineering is an innocent or morally neutral maneuver. They both involve criminal intent to turn on the spigot of taxpayer money and then to jam it so that it cannot be turned off. They are de rigueur practices of our military-industrial complex.

Front-loading is the practice of appropriating funds for a new weapons project based solely on assurances by its official sponsors about what it can do.

This happens long before a prototype has been built or tested, and invariably involves the quoting of unrealistically low unit costs for a sizeable order. Assurances are always given that the system's technical requirements will be simple or have already been met. Low-balling future costs, an intrinsic aspect of front-loading, is an old Defense Department trick, a governmental version of bait-and-switch. (What is introduced as a great bargain regularly turns out to be a grossly expensive lemon.)

Political engineering is the strategy of awarding contracts in as many different Congressional districts as possible. By making voters and Congressional incumbents dependent on military money, the Pentagon's political engineers put pressure on them to continue supporting front-loaded programs even after their true costs become apparent.[...]

Even though extended training would seem to be a necessary corollary of the complexity of such weapons systems, the excessive cost actually leads to reductions in training time for pilots and others. In the long run, it is because of such expedients and short-term fixes that American casualties may increase and, sooner or later, battles or wars may be lost.

For example, Northrop-Grumman's much touted B-2 stealth bomber has proven to be almost totally worthless. It is too delicate to deploy to harsh climates without special hangars first being built to protect it at ridiculous expense; it cannot fulfill any combat missions that older designs were not fully adequate to perform; and -- at a total cost of $44.75 billion for only 21 bombers -- it wastes resources needed for real combat situations.

Instead, in military terms, the most unexpectedly successful post-Vietnam aircraft has been the Fairchild A-10, unflatteringly nicknamed the "Warthog."

It is the only close-support aircraft ever developed by the U.S. Air Force. Its task is to loiter over battlefields and assist ground forces in disposing of obstinate or formidable targets, which is not something that fits comfortably with the Air Force's hot-shot self-image.

Some 715 A-10s were produced and they served with great effectiveness in the first Persian Gulf War. All 715 cumulatively cost less than three B-2 bombers. The A-10 is now out of production because the Air Force establishment favors extremely fast aircraft that fly in straight lines at high altitudes rather than aircraft that are useful in battle. In the Afghan war, the Air Force has regularly inflicted heavy casualties on innocent civilians at least in part because it tries to attack ground targets from the air with inappropriately high-performance equipment.

Using the F-22 to Fight the F-16

The military-industrial complex is today so confident of its skills in gaming the system that it does not hesitate to publicize how many workers in a particular district will lose their jobs if a particular project is canceled.

Threats are also made -- and put into effect -- to withhold political contributions from uncooperative congressional representatives.

As Spinney recalls, "In July 1989, when some members of Congress began to build a coalition aimed at canceling the B-2, Northrop Corporation, the B-2's prime contractor, retaliated by releasing data which had previously been classified showing that tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions in profits were at risk in 46 states and 383 congressional districts." The B-2 was not cancelled.[...]

Both front-loading and political engineering are alive and well in 2009. They are, in fact, now at the center of fierce controversies surrounding the extreme age of the present fleet of Air Force fighter aircraft, most of which date from the 1980s.

Meanwhile the costs of the two most likely successors to the workhorse F-16 -- the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter -- have run up so high that the government cannot afford to purchase significant numbers of either or them.

The F-16 made its first flight in December 1976, and a total of 4,400 have been built. They have been sold, or given away, all over the world. Planning for the F-22 began in 1986, when the Cold War was still alive (even if on life support), and the Air Force was trumpeting its fears that the other superpower, the USSR, was planning a new, ultra-fast, highly maneuverable fighter.

By the time the prototype F-22 had its roll-out on May 11, 1997, the Cold War was nearly a decade in its grave, and it was perfectly apparent that the Soviet aircraft it was intended to match would never be built. Lockheed Martin, the F-22's prime contractor, naturally argued that we needed it anyway and made plans to sell some 438 airplanes for a total tab of $70 billion.

By mid-2008, only 183 F-22s were on order, 122 of which had been delivered. The numbers had been reduced due to cost overruns. The Air Force still wants to buy an additional 198 planes, but Secretary Gates and his leading assistants have balked. No wonder. According to arms experts Bill Hartung and Christopher Preble, at more than $350 million each, the F-22 is "the most expensive fighter plane ever built."

The F-22 has several strikingly expensive characteristics which actually limit its usefulness. It is allegedly a stealth fighter -- that is, an airplane with a shape that reduces its visibility on radar -- but there is no such thing as an airplane completely invisible to all radar. In any case, once it turns on its own fire-control radar, which it must do in combat, it becomes fully visible to an enemy.

The F-22 is able to maneuver at very high altitudes, but this is of limited value since there are no other airplanes in service anywhere that can engage in combat at such heights. It can cruise at twice the speed of sound in level flight without the use of its afterburners (which consume fuel at an accelerated rate), but there are no potential adversaries for which these capabilities are relevant.

The plane is obviously blindingly irrelevant to "fourth-generation wars" like that with the Taliban in Afghanistan -- the sorts of conflicts for which American strategists inside the Pentagon and out believe the United States should be preparing.[...]

Unfortunately, President Obama's approach to the Bush administration's Afghan War remains deeply flawed and will only entrap us in another quagmire, whatever planes we put in the skies over that country.

Nonetheless, the F-22 is still being promoted as the plane to buy almost entirely through front-loading and political engineering. Some apologists for the Air Force also claim that we need the F-22 to face the F-16. Their argument goes this way: We have sold so many F-16s to allies and Third World customers that, if we ever had to fight one of them, that country might prevail using our own equipment against us. Some foreign air forces like Israel's are fully equipped with F-16s and their pilots actually receive more training and monthly practice hours than ours do.

This, however, seems a trivial reason for funding more F-22s. We should instead simply not get involved in wars with former allies we have armed, although this is why Congress prohibited Lockheed from selling the F-22 abroad.

Some Pentagon critics contend that the Air Force and prime contractors lobby for arms sales abroad because they artificially generate a demand for new weapons at home that are "better" than the ones we've sold elsewhere.

Thanks to political engineering, the F-22 has parts suppliers in 44 states, and some 25,000 people have well-paying jobs building it. Lockheed Martin and some in the Defense Department have therefore proposed that, if the F-22 is cancelled, it should be replaced by the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, also built by Lockheed Martin.

Most serious observers believe that this would only make a bad situation worse. So far the F-35 shows every sign of being, in Chuck Spinney's words, "a far more costly and more troubled turkey" than the F-22, "even though it has a distinction that even the F-22 cannot claim, namely it is tailored to meet the same threat that… ceased to exist at least three years before the F-35 R&D [research and development] program began in 1994."

The F-35 is considerably more complex than the F-22, meaning that it will undoubtedly be even more expensive to repair and will break down even more easily. Its cost per plane is guaranteed to continue to spiral upwards. The design of the F-22 involves 4 million lines of computer code; the F-35, 19 million lines.

The Pentagon sold the F-35 to Congress in 1998 with the promise of a unit cost of $184 million per aircraft. By 2008, that had risen to $355 million per aircraft and the plane was already two years behind schedule.

According to Pierre M. Sprey, one of the original sponsors of the F-16, and Winslow T. Wheeler, a 31-year veteran staff official on Senate defense committees, the F-35 is overweight, underpowered, and "less maneuverable than the appallingly vulnerable F-105 'lead sled' that got wiped out over North Vietnam in the Indochina War." Its makers claim that it will be a bomber as well as a fighter, but it will have a payload of only two 2,000-pound bombs, far less than American fighters of the Vietnam era. Although the Air Force praises its stealth features, it will lose these as soon as it mounts bombs under its wings, which will alter its shape most un-stealthily.

It is a non-starter for close-air-support missions because it is too fast for a pilot to be able to spot tactical targets. It is too delicate and potentially flammable to be able to withstand ground fire. If built, it will end up as the most expensive defense contract in history without offering a serious replacement for any of the fighters or fighter-bombers currently in service.
[...]

[...] Almost 30 years after those words were written, the situation has grown far worse. Until we decide (or are forced) to dismantle our empire, sell off most of our 761 military bases (according to official statistics for fiscal year 2008) in other people's countries, and bring our military expenditures into line with those of the rest of the world, we are destined to go bankrupt in the name of national defense.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175029/chalmers_johnson_economic_death_spiral_at_the_pentagon

[seeker_two]

These are parts of an article I found. Seems like an interesting read:

Great article....brings up a lot of interesting points...esp. why we don't make more A-10's.... 

[makattak]

These are parts of an article I found. Seems like an interesting read:

I won't say it's a great article. Rather, I'd say it's a foolish article.

Allow me to summarize:

He is convinced we will not be fighting a large-scale war against another nation in the "future."

As a result, we are just wasting money on advanced weapon systems that would enable us to win such a war. We should focus only on the "small-scale conflicts" most likely to pop up. The spending we do "hemorrhage" at most military systems is politically motivated.

Here's the quote that sums up the entire article:

Our problems are those of a very rich country which has become accustomed over the years to defense budgets that are actually jobs programs and also a major source of pork for the use of politicians in their reelection campaigns.

He and his "experts" are unable to look beyond the current situation and see the reason we are likely to fight only "small-scale" wars in the near future.

We will not fight large scale wars because the US Military would utterly destroy any opposing military it faces. Other countries are not positioning themselves for large scale wars because they would lose.

If we destroy the capability to prosecute large scale wars, these "experts" would be amazed that SOME MAGIC made it more likely we will fight them...

The US having the most advanced fighting systems in the world ENSURES we will not have to use them.

Allow me to close with some sage advice:

Si vis pacem, para bellum.

If you want peace, prepare for war: it means the best way to deter wars is to be prepared for them.

[MicroBalrog]

Let us not forget who administers defense spending: Congress and the President of the United States.

Are you seriously telling me the same people who added mountains of pork to every other government program, who gave you Social Security,  Medicare, TARP, and hired the CEO of Fannie Mae to administer the bailout money.... will somehow give you a military budget free from waste and pork?

How will this occur?

[makattak]

Let us not forget who administers defense spending: Congress and the President of the United States.

Are you seriously telling me the same people who added mountains of pork to every other government program, who gave you Social Security,  Medicare, TARP, and hired the CEO of Fannie Mae to administer the bailout money.... will somehow give you a military budget free from waste and pork?

How will this occur?

Nope. Again, in my first post, I pointed out if it were only about waste, I'd be happy.

However, are you seriously telling me the same people who added mountains of pork to every other government program, who gave you Social Security,  Medicare, TARP, and hired the CEO of Fannie Mae to administer the bailout money.... will somehow give you a military budget from which they have removed waste and pork?

Or is that what you were saying and we're talking past one another?

[bscl]

Quote from Blackenzy's article snippet:

The F-35 is considerably more complex than the F-22, meaning that it will undoubtedly be even more expensive to repair and will break down even more easily. Its cost per plane is guaranteed to continue to spiral upwards. The design of the F-22 involves 4 million lines of computer code; the F-35, 19 million lines.

I don't know enough to comment about whether or not the F-35 will be more expensive to repair or not but woudn't you expect more lines of code from a system that was designed later?   

In any case, once it turns on its own fire-control radar, which it must do in combat, it becomes fully visible to an enemy.

Isn't this the point of having AWACS, AMRAAM and things like JTIDS?  Does the F-22 (or any aircraft with datalink for that matter) actually have to switch on it's radar to go into combat?

Although it looks from an outsider like me that military procurement has some - problems (see comments to shipbuilders from former SecNAV Winter for a good example), are we expecting to ONLY fight insurgencies from now on?  What happens if we do get into a conventional war while we are equipped and trained to primarily fight insurgencies?  Will we get the same talking heads slamming whichever administration is in charge for "going to war with the army you have," and putting up a daily death toll of our pilots/soldiers/marines/sailors to hammer their point home? 

[roo_ster]

Will we get the same talking heads slamming whichever administration is in charge for "going to war with the army you have," and putting up a daily death toll of our pilots/soldiers/marines/sailors to hammer their point home? 

Only if the POTUS is a Republican. 

[MicroBalrog]

However, are you seriously telling me the same people who added mountains of pork to every other government program, who gave you Social Security,  Medicare, TARP, and hired the CEO of Fannie Mae to administer the bailout money.... will somehow give you a military budget from which they have removed waste and pork?

No, I do not. I suspect the current Left doesn't like the military much, and since they need to look 'fiscally responsible' and cut spending somewhere, it'll be military spending. But I don't think that every single shiny weapon the US is procuring is really necessary for national security, rather than the jobs of people in certain Congressional districts.

[makattak]

No, I do not. I suspect the current Left doesn't like the military much, and since they need to look 'fiscally responsible' and cut spending somewhere, it'll be military spending. But I don't think that every single shiny weapon the US is procuring is really necessary for national security, rather than the jobs of people in certain Congressional districts.

Well said. A corollary to that would also be that I don't think that every single shiny weapon that they will be cutting is immaterial to national security, either.

Effectively, I don't trust them to make such judgements. As such, I would prefer to overspend than to cut important programs. Again, I will reference missile defense.

The government is likely to make errors, and I would prefer they err on the side of too much spending when we are discussing national defense.

[Blakenzy]

Well, spending on a strong military capable of defeating any foe isn't a bad idea by any means, but the way our defense infrastructure has been going about seeking that strong military is probably the most inefficient way possible. In other words, we are getting the least bang for the buck.

As was pointed out, the US method of procuring our "guns" is systematically falling short of proposed requirements and deadlines, ALWAYS goes over budget, and usually results in weapon systems that, although technologically mindblowing and promising near magical qualities, have not yet found a niche in any currently possible warfare scenario. Not only that, but usually the new technology is not replacing the current on a one-for-one basis, and brings along new maintenance costs that encroach on training.

If you look back, superior technology, expensive technology, seldom won a fight. F4U Corsairs managed to shoot down brand new MiGs in Korea because American WWII vets were better pilots, state of the art infrared guided missiles routinely missed their targets in Vietnam because designers didn't factor in the heat emanating from the jungle canopy, high quality Tiger tanks met their end to farm tractor-like Shermans because they were outnumbered and out maneuvered.

So, while we spend hundreds of billions on what may someday, perhaps may be useful in a fight, we are currently patrolling current war zones with vehicles totally inadequate for dealing with the number one GI killer:IEDs, And no, "uparmored" HMMVs are not adequate for IEDs.

And as far as "OMG China will steam roll us if we lower defense spending!", well we are currently China's cash cow, and they are awash in our T-bills, so I wouldn't worry about them until we go flat broke and they decide to collect... yet another reason to cut spending hehe

[taurusowner]

Blakenzy

To be fair, even vehicles that are designed to be explosive resistant combat vehicles like the M1 Abrams, can't stand up to EFP-IEDs.  Trust me

[makattak]

And as far as "OMG China will steam roll us if we lower defense spending!", well we are currently China's cash cow, and they are awash in our T-bills, so I wouldn't worry about them until we go flat broke and they decide to collect... yet another reason to cut spending hehe

Guess who was Germany's number one trading partner in 1939...

[Strings]

>To be fair, even vehicles that are designed to be explosive resistant combat vehicles like the M1 Abrams, can't stand up to EFP-IEDs.  Trust me sad<

Rule of armor... ANY armor: it's ALWAYS easier to develop a way of defeating armor than it is to develop better armor

Honestly, I see one major problem with the military procurement issue: we try to replace what doesn't need to be, and resist replace what needs it. Case in point: the main combat rifle.

 Really, when the AR series was developed, it wasn't needed. Yes, it offered an improvement over the M-14 in terms of weight and controlability, but had several bugs. We adopted it anyway.

 Since it was adopted, we've improved the design to the point it is just about the ultimate combat arm: multiple caliber* and configuration** capability, with minimal armorer work needed. And now, when we've worked the bugs out, we've started looking to replace it...


*: .22lr, .223, 7.62x39, 6.5 Grendel, 6.7 spl, 9mmP, .50 Beauwulf, .50 BMG (all using the same receiver, and just off the top of my head)

**: rimfire trainer, standard infantry rifle, compact PDW, SAW, carbine,  accurized marksman (again, all using the same receiver and fire control group)

[longeyes]

Counter-insurgency is the new Maginot Line?

NO ONE knows who and what we will be fighting 20 years from now.  If there is a place for "diversity" this is it.

While they write millions of lines of code for advanced weapons systems, the madrassas continue to proliferate along with the endowed chairs in our own great universities, and humble sorts like Jane Elliott continue to transform entire societies.  The war is coming up from within...

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

No, I do not. I suspect the current Left doesn't like the military much, and since they need to look 'fiscally responsible' and cut spending somewhere, it'll be military spending. But I don't think that every single shiny weapon the US is procuring is really necessary for national security, rather than the jobs of people in certain Congressional districts.

This is what Clinton did to balance the budget when he was President.  He wanted to spend lots of money on entitlements, but he also wanted to look fiscally responsible, so he moved money from defense to welfare.

The fact that we found ourselves underprepared for two minor brush wars just a few years later is, I'm sure, just a coincidence.

Defense spending certainly has its share of waste.  The difference is that when we overspend on defense we do usually get some additional national defense capability out of the deal.  Wasteful spending in other areas of government rarely produces anything of value.

I had to drive across the country this weekend.  You wouldn't believe how many miles of perfectly good interstate highway are being torn up and repaved right now.  Perfectly good, sound, smooth blacktop is being chewed up and replaced with identical perfectly good blacktop.  Why?  Because someone in government (Obama) made the money available ans said "spend it or lose it".  So they're spending it.  Wastefully.  Needlessly.

What do we get out of it?  New interstate highway pavement that is indistinguishable from the old pavement.  That is to say we're getting nothing. 

At least when we overspend on a bomber program we eventually get some shiny new bombers that we didn't have before. 

[MicroBalrog]

The fact that we found ourselves underprepared for two minor brush wars just a few years later is, I'm sure, just a coincidence.

What capabilities (specifically) did Clinton defund? How would these have helped in a brush war?

[Perd Hapley]

He "defunded" the size of the military, in terms of personnel and bases. 

[MicroBalrog]

He "defunded" the size of the military, in terms of personnel and bases. 

Yes, but which bases and personnel did he cut?

Upon checking I see that in the timeperiod 1993-2000 the size of the US military has been reduced by 91,622 troops. While this is a sizeable scaleback, the cuts that occured earlier, between 1989-1993, were larger (197,318 troops). Yet it remains unclear to me whether these troops were in units or positions that would have been important or helpful during these two wars (Iraq-Afghanistan). Admittedly the source I found this in is a liberal website, so these numbers could be wrong. I also admit to knowing very little on the different units of the US military.

However, I wish to point out the following:

1. Unlike what the media would have us believe, the United States military had so far handled itself admirably in Iraq. In any historical context, a military commander that crushes the (numerically superior) conventional forces of the enemy  (Iraqi military outnumbered US-allied military forces as 4-3 on the day of the invasion) within 40 days, and inflicts enemy casualties on a 44-1 ratio (assuming most conservative Iraqi military casualty numbers), and then proceeds to engage and suppress (violence in Iraq is abating) an enemy insurgency while inflicting at least a 2-1 casualty ratio (including Iraqi coalition dead) upon the enemy and capturing 30,000 guerillas, further proceeding to successfully hand over most of the country to local forces - any military commander who accomplishes even one of those things would have been lauded as a hero. Many generals have accomplished less for their countries and have had monuments built to them. George Bush has been laughed at. Petraeus had been branded a 'traitor' by the Left.

But America's military had not underperformed in Iraq.

America's military was expected to get stuck for months fighting Saddam's army. They beat them in 40 days.

America's military was expected to get stuck for decades fighting an 'unwinnable' war. They are winning against the insurgency.

Liberals have been claiming that America's army is underequipped and undertrained to fight the Iraqi war. And yet almost every time insurgents fight American forces, the insurgents get routed.

True, Afghanistan has so far fared worse. However it is worth remembering that so far the US and its allies had suffered a combined total of over 6,000 casualties (mostly Afghani government forces) and performed very, very admirably against the Taleban, much better than the British and Soviets had in previous engagements in that area.