Battleland

Another Way to Cut a Trillion

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This thing is beginning to snowball. Here’s Kori Schake  penning a piece in the just-released Winter 2012 issue of Orbis, the quarterly journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, entitled Margin Call: How to Cut a Trillion From Defense. She doesn’t say it is going to be easy, and that it means real change:

The American military is brilliant at effectiveness; efficiency not so much. We will need to relearn the cost-consciousness of an earlier age. We must study the mistakes of previous cuts beyond the harangue about how we always cut too much after wars. We may need to simplify the objectives we expect our military to achieve. Bottom line: the standard we have set in our recent wars is unachievable by the means we will have available to us.

Schake is no tree-hugging pacifist: she’s a research fellow at Stanford’s hawkish Hoover Institution. She worked in the Pentagon for the Joint Staff’s Strategy and Policy Directorate (J-5). She lectures on international security studies at West Point. And, perhaps most tellingly, she served in the George W. Bush White House as the National Security Council’s director for defense strategy and requirements.