The Congressional Budget Office offers up another option that won’t affect troops or hardware — force retirees to pay more for their post-military health care. Half the military’s officers and 15 percent of its enlisted force retire from the service, allowing them access to this bargain. The family fee since the system was revamped …
Pentagon
Great Minds &c.
James Dubik makes the same point Tuesday in a New York Times op-ed that I made this morning about the wisdom, or lack thereof, of targeting Gaddafi. He even used the same word: charade. Of course, as a retired Army lieutenant general, he’s leery of airpower’s power:
So far, we have chosen an instrument — airstrikes — that is
…
Libya: More On Targeting Muammar
Folks in the Administration say they can’t target Muammar Gaddafi — per this earlier post — because the U.N. resolution doesn’t permit it. But that kind of makes you wonder why the Brit defence boss, Liam Fox, speaks so freely about Gaddafi being a Hellfire helipad. The U.S. has sometimes viewed UN resolutions as rubber bands, able …
CBO Defense Option #2
Another Congressional Budget Office way to trim defense spending is to slow the rate of growth in troops’ pay. That’s going to be a tough sell, especially during wartime. For a decade, Congress has boosted the Pentagon’s annual recommendation that military pay raises match the employment cost index by adding 0.5% to each year’s ECI. …
Libya: Targeting Charades
Charade is a French word, meaning entertainment. So is Target, at least when my wife shops there (“TAR-jay!”). But why are we engaging in such a charade when it comes to targeting Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi?
“If the regime continues to wage war on its people, those who are involved in those command-and-control assets need to …
CBO Defense Option #1
Let’s cut the defense budget by…cutting the defense budget. This CBO chart shows that letting defense spending grow 1 percentage point less than now planned would save $67.3 billion over the next five years (that’s in outlays, the actually money spent in a given year [think of it as buying something with a check], not budget …
Brass Creep: Too Many Generals at the Air Force?
Over at the POGO blog, I flagged a compelling Air Force Times investigation into the the explosion of the top ranks of flag officers at the Air Force, a pet peeve of the SECDEF. To whet your appetite, check out this nugget from the Air Force Times story: “In the last seven years alone, the service has shed nearly 43,000 airmen while …
CBO On Defense Options
Every year, the green eye-shade crowd at the Congressional Budget Office takes its weed-whacker to the federal budget in its poetically-titled Reducing the Deficit: Spending and Revenue Options. The CBO doesn’t make any recommendations about what its masters — those would be the members of Congress — should do. It simply lists some …
A Question For the Obama Administration:
Last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates argued that President Obama’s order to cut $400 billion from national-security spending over the next 12 years will force the U.S. military to curtail some of its far-flung duties. “This needs to be a process that is driven by the analysis,” he said, “as well as missions that our elected …
Welcome Home, Soldier…
The gap between our publicly professed pride for our returning troops – and how they actually are treated when they need help – never ceases to amaze. The latest on this care chasm is explained on the front page of Saturday’s Washington Post. It details the woes faced by veterans who believe they have been short-changed by the …
Hellfire: Now Debuting Over Libya
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU1ukWWOFqg]
So we’ve got up to four AGM-114 Hellfire missiles hanging from a pair of Predators now flying over Libya. The advantage to piggybacking these missiles on drones is that they can loiter over hostile territory for hours, often without people on the ground aware that they’re circling …
Libya: “Progress,” By The Numbers
The U.S. military has shied away from enemy body counts during wartime since Vietnam. Enemy attrition, not so much (attrition, noun — a wearing down or weakening of resistance, especially as a result of continuous pressure or harassment). So Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, rolled out this new preferred …
Electronic Agent Orange?
Those of you of a certain vintage will recall how the U.S. military dumped dioxin-laced Agent Orange defoliant all over Vietnam in hopes of an instant autumn — stripping leaves from the jungle so the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese couldn’t hide. But the cost of chemical defoliation was so high, and so tragic, that an electronic …